Charles Kettering Quotes - Page 4

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.

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.

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.

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.

The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Don't bring anything to me but trouble.