Charles Kettering Quotes about Science

Every great improvement has come after repeated failures. Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

Whenever you look at a piece of work and you think the fellow was crazy, then you want to pay some attention to that. One of you is likely to be, and you had better find out which one it is. It makes an awful lot of difference.

Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.

Problems are the price of progress. Don't bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me.

There exist limitless opportunities in every industry. Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.

My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid.

You will never stub your toe standing still. The faster you go, the more chance there is of stubbing your toe, but the more chance you have of getting somewhere.

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.

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

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.

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.

The only time you mustn't fail is the last time you try.

In America we can say what we think, and even if we can't think, we can say it anyhow.

Thinking is one thing no one has ever been able to tax.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.