Top 113 Quotes & Sayings by Charles Kettering - Page 2

If I want to stop a research program I can always do it by getting a few experts to sit in on the subject, because they know right away that it was a fool thing to try in the first place.

What I believe is that, by proper effort, we make the future almost anything we want to make it.

Nothing ever built arose to touch the skies unless some man dreamed that it should, some man believed that it could, and some man willed that it must.

Failures, repeated failures, are sign-posts on the road to achievement. The only time you don't want to fail is the last time you try something (and it works).

I could do nothing without my problems; they toughen my mind. In fact, I tell my assistants not to bring me their successes for they weaken me, but rather to bring me their problems, for they strengthen me.

You can send a message around the world in one-fifth of a second, yet it may take years for it to get from the outside of a man's head to the inside.

In many ways ideas are more important than people - they are much more permanent.

Don't be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don't follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it's enough.

you must take the problem as it is, and let it be what it wants to be.

I expect to spend the rest of my life in the future, so I want to be reasonably sure of what kind of future it's going to be. That is my reason for planning.

We must look forward to the future as that is where most of us will be spending the rest of our lives.

Research is an organized method for keeping you reasonably dissatisfied with what you have.

You are always too late with a development if you are so slow that people demand it before you yourself recognize it. The research department should have foreseen what was necessary and had it ready to a point where people never knew they wanted it until it was made available to them.

We suffer not from overproduction but from undercirculation. You have heard of technocracy. I wish I had those fellows for my competitors. I'd like to take the automobile it is said they predicted could be made now that would last fifty years. Even if never used, this automobile would not be worth anything except to a junkman in ten years, because of the changes in men's tastes and ideas. This desire for change is an inherent quality in human nature, so that the present generation must not try to crystallize the needs of the future ones.

The future can be anything we want it to be, providing we have the faith and that we realize that peace, no less than war, required blood and sweat and tears.

Learn how to fail intelligently.

I often say that research is a way of finding out what you are going to do when you can't keep on doing what you are doing now.

I think that the greatest education in the world is the education which helps one to be able to do the right things at the time it has to be done.

Every honest researcher I know admits he's just a professional amateur. He's doing whatever he's doing for the first time. That makes him an amateur. He has sense enough to know that he's going to have a lot of trouble, so that makes him a professional.

Education is man's going forward from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty.Where there is an open mind there will always be a frontier.

If we taught music the way we try to teach engineering, in an unbroken four year course, we could end up with all theory and no music. When we study music, we start to practice from the beginning, and we practice for the entire time.

People see the wrongness in an idea much quicker that the rightness.

It is easy to build a philosophy - it doesn't have to run

It is man's destiny to ponder on the riddle of existence and, as a byproduct of his wonderment, to create a new life on this earth.

We have a lot of people revolutionizing the world because they've never had to present a working model.

A man must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere.

Obsolescence is a factor which says that the new thing I bring you is worth more than the unused value of the old thing.

Research is an organized method of trying to find out what you are going to do after you cannot do what you are doing now. It may also be said to be the method of keeping a customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has. That means constant improvement and change so that the customer will be stimulated to desire the new product enough to buy it to replace the one he has.

I've never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.

Why is the human skull as dense as it is? Nowadays we can send a message around the world in one-seventh of a second, but it takes years to drive an idea through a quarter-inch of human skull.

Research is industrial prospecting. The oil prospectors use every scientific means to find new paying wells. Oil is found by each one of a number of methods. My own group of men are prospecting in a different field, using every possible scientific means. We believe there are still things left to be discovered. We have only stumbled upon a few barrels of physical laws from the great pool of knowledge. Some day we are going to hit a gusher.

The sure ways to create new ventures of discovery are to keep an open mind.

And there is the point exactly, we are all the time blaming difficulties on to something else. Our real trouble is that we are too soft to solve the problem.

The typical eye sees the ten per cent bad of an idea and overlooks the ninety per cent good.

The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction.

We work day after day, not to finish things; but to make the future better ... because we will spend the rest of our lives there.

The difference between intelligence and an education is this: that intelligence will make a good living for you, but education won't do much for you at all.

Industry prospers when it offers people articles which they want more than they want anything they now have. The fact is that people never buy what they need. They buy what they want.

Modern psychology teaches that experience is not merely the best teacher, but the only possible teacher.. There is no war between theory and practice. The most valuable experience demands both, and the theory should supplement the practice and not precede it.

Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.

A research problem is not solved by apparatus; it is solved in a man's head.

We have been measuring too much in terms of the dollar. What we should do is think in terms of useful materials-things that will be of value to us in our daily life.

When I was research head of General Motors and wanted a problem solved, I'd place a table outside the meeting room with a sign: "Leave slide rules here." If I didn't do that, I'd find someone reaching for his slide rule. Then he'd be on his feet saying, "Boss, you can't do it."

There has never been any 30-hour week for men who had anything to do.

Bankers regard research as most dangerous a thing that makes banking hazardous due to the rapid changes it brings about in industry.

The simplest way to assure sales is to keep changing the product the market for new things is indefinitely elastic. One of the fundamental purposes of advertising, styling, and research is to foster a healthy dissatisfaction.

Don't bring anything to me but trouble.

Do not bring me your successes; they weaken me. Bring me your problems; they strengthen me.

One of the things we have to be thankful for is that we don't get as much government as we pay for.

We have reason not to be afraid of the machine, for there is always constructive change, the enemy of machines, making them change to fit new conditions.

The opportunities in this world are as great as we have the imagination to see them... but we never get that view from the bottom of the nest.

We are just in the kindergarten of uncovering things; there is no downcurve in science.

If a fellow wants to be nobody in the business world, let him neglect sending the mailman to somebody on his behalf.