Top 90 Charles F. Kettering Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

52. “I don’t want men of experience working for me. The experienced man is always telling me why something can’t be done. The fellow who has not had any experience is so dumb he doesn’t know a thing can’t be done – and he goes ahead and does it.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

54. “I’ve never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

57. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

58. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

60. “The whole fun of living is trying to make something better.”

— Charles F. Kettering

61. “A problem thoroughly understood is always fairly simple. Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

63. “An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn’t take his education too seriously.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

65. “The person who doesn’t know something can’t be done will often find a way to go ahead and do it.”

— Charles F. Kettering

66. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

67. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

68. “Don’t bring anything to me but trouble.”

— Charles F. Kettering

69. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

70. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

73. “The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.”

— Charles F. Kettering

74. “In America we can say what we think, and even if we can’t think, we can say it anyhow.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

76. “I object to people running down the future. I am going to live all the rest of my life there.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

78. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

79. “It is easy to build a philosophy – it doesn’t have to run.”

— Charles F. Kettering

80. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

81. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

82. “We have a lot of people revolutionizing the world because they’ve never had to present a working model.”

— Charles F. Kettering

83. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

84. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

86. “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.””

— Charles F. Kettering

87. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

88. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

90. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering