Quotes from Charles Kettering

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

An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he's in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.

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

Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.

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.

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

Action without intelligence is a form of insanity, but intelligence without action is the greatest form of stupidity in the world.

High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.

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

We need to teach the highly educated man that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. He must learn how to fail intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.

We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee to fail intelligently... to experiment over and over again and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I am not interested in the past. I am interested in the future, for that is where I expect to spend the rest of my life.

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

Every time you tear a leaf off a calendar, you present a new place for new ideas and progress.

It doesn't matter if you try and try and try again, and fail. It does matter if you try and fail, and fail to try again.

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