Quotes from Charles Kettering

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

99 percent of success is built on failure.

It is the 'follow through' that makes the great difference between ultimate success and failure, because it is so easy to stop.

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.

There will always be a frontier where there is an open mind and a willing hand.

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.

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

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

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

This problem, too, will look simple after it is solved.

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

It is not a disgrace to fail. Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.

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.

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.

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.

If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.

If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.

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

You can't have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.

Failures, repeated failures, are sign-posts on the road to achievement. The only time you don't want to fail is the last time you try something (and it works).

I expect to spend the rest of my life in the future, so I want to be reasonably sure of what kind of future it's going to be. That is my reason for planning.

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

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

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.