Quotes from Henry Ford

I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.

We try to pay a man what he is worth and we are not inclined to keep a man who is not worth more than the minimum wage.

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.

As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty and special privilege grow.

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

Where people work longest and with least leisure, they buy the fewest goods. No towns were so poor as those of England where the people, from children up, worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. They were poor because these overworked people soon wore out -- they became less and less valuable as workers. Therefore, they earned less and less and could buy less and less.

I am looking for a lot of men who have and infinite capacity to not know what can't be done.

New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don't know what the hell the rest of the United States is.

Money is like an arm or leg- use it or lose it.

To see a thing clearly in the mind makes it begin to take form.

It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.

Money doesn't change men, it merely unmasks them. If a man is naturally selfish or arrogant or greedy, the money brings that out, that's all.

Experience is the thing of supreme value".

That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness.

Do you want to know the cause of war? It is capitalism, greed, the dirty hunger for dollars. Take away the capitalist, and you will sweep war from the earth.

As we serve our jobs we serve the world.

It is not usual to speak of an employee as a partner, and yet what else is he?

Being greedy for money is the surest way not to get it, but when one serves for the sake of service—for the satisfaction of doing that which one believes to be right—then money abundantly takes care of itself.

To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.

The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debt.

That is the way with wise people—they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work.

It is probably true that the commonest real cause of anti-semitism is the action of the international Jew who is often unknown and always secure, but innocent victim of it is the poor Jew.

The natural thing to do is to work—to recognize that prosperity and happiness can be obtained only through honest effort.

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we made today.