Henry Ford Quotes

80 Quotes on Teamwork, Success, Growth, Efficiency, and Overcoming Challenges

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

“Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again.”

“My best friend is one who brings out the best in me”

“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals.”

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”

“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.”

“It is perhaps well enough that the people of the Nation do not know or understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

“So, while the people are indeed supreme over the written Constitution, the spiritual constitution is supreme over them. The French Revolutionists wrote constitutions too—every drunken writer among them tossed off a constitution. Where are they? All vanished. Why? Because they were not in harmony with the constitution of the universe. The power of the Constitution is not dependent on any Government, but on its inherent rightness and practicability.”

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

“It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste”

“There is no man living who isn't capable of doing more than he thinks he can do.”

“Any man who thinks he is going to be happy and prosperous by letting the government take care of him should take a close look at the American Indian.”

“You will find men who want to be carried on the shoulders of others, who think that the world owes them a living. They don't seem to see that we must all lift together and pull together.”

“I am not a reformer. I think there is entirely too much attempt at reforming in the world and that we pay too much attention to reformers. We have two kinds of reformers. Both are nuisances. The man who calls himself a reformer wants to smash things. He is the sort of man who would tear up a whole shirt because the collar button did not fit the buttonhole. It would never occur to him to enlarge the buttonhole. This sort of reformer never under any circumstances knows what he is doing. Experience and reform do not go together. A reformer cannot keep his zeal at white heat in the presence of a fact. He must discard all facts.”

“I adopted the theory of Reincarnation when I was twenty six. Religion offered nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work is futile if we cannot utilise the experience we collect in one life in the next. When I discovered Reincarnation it was as if I had found a universal plan. I realised that there was a chance to work out my ideas. Time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock. Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more. The discovery of Reincarnation put my mind at ease. If you preserve a record of this conversation, write it so that it puts men’s minds at ease. I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us.”

“Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice”

“Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”

“Life is a series of experiences, each of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward.”

“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.”

“I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one — and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces.”

“The provision of a whole new system of electric generation emancipated industry from the leather belt and line shaft, for it eventually became possible to provide each tool with its own electric motor. This may seem only a detail of minor importance. In fact, modern industry could not be carried out with the belt and line shaft for a number of reasons. The motor enabled machinery to be arranged in the order of the work, and that alone has probably doubled the efficiency of industry, for it has cut out a tremendous amount of useless handling and hauling. The belt and line shaft were also tremendously wasteful – so wasteful indeed that no factory could be really large, for even the longest line shaft was small according to modern requirements. Also high speed tools were impossible under the old conditions – neither the pulleys nor the belts could stand modern speeds. Without high speed tools and the finer steels which they brought about, there could be nothing of what we call modern industry.”

“International financiers are behind all war. They are what is called the international Jew: German-Jews, French-Jews, English-Jews, American-Jews … the Jew is the threat.”

“Jews have always controlled the business (...). The motion picture influence of the United States and Canada (...) is exclusively under the control, moral and financial, of the Jewish manipulators of the public mind.”

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.”

“The economic fundamental is labour.”

“You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.”

“Don't find fault, find a remedy; anybody can complain”

“Vision without execution is just hallucination.”

“When everything seem to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it….”

“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.”

“Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs”

“One of the greatest discoveries a person makes, one of their great surprises, is to find they can do what they were afraid they couldn't do.”

“If money is your hope for independence, you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.”

“You say I started out with practically nothing, but that isn't correct. We all start with all there is, it's how we use it that makes things possible.”

“The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one's destiny to do, and then do it.”

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.”

“success is 99% failure”

“I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago.”

“A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.”

“There are three things that grow more precious with age; old wood to burn, old books to read, and old friends to enjoy.”

“Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necesary to a worthwhile achievement".”

“Money doesn't make us anyway it just unmasks us.”

“There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.”

“A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”

“everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.”

“To do more for the world than the world does for you - that is success.”

“The way to learn to do things is to do things. The way to learn a trade is to work at it. Success teaches how to succeed. Begin with the determination to succeed, and the work is half done already.”

“Genius is seldom recognized for what it is: a great capacity for hard work.”

“There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail”

“You don't have to hold a position in order to be a leader.”

“An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Givers have to set limits because takers rarely do.”

“I've never made a flight in an airplane, and I don't know that I'm particularly anxious to. I would, though, like to take a trip in a dirigible. Bring one out here some time, won't you, Doctor Eckener, and give me a ride?”

“Through all the years that I have been in business I have never yet found our business bad as a result of any outside force. It has always been due to some defect in our own company, and whenever we located and repaired that defect our business became good again - regardless of what anyone else might be doing. And it will always be found that this country has nationally bad business when business men are drifting, and that business is good when men take hold of their own affairs, put leadership into them, and push forward in spite of obstacles. Only disaster can result when the fundamental principles of business are disregarded and what looks like the easiest way is taken. These fundamentals, as I see them, are:
(1) To make an ever increasingly large quantity of goods of the best possible quality, to make them in the best and most economical fashion, and to force them out onto the market.
(2) To strive always for higher quality and lower prices as well as lower costs.
(3) To raise wages gradually but continuously B and never to cut them.
(4) To get the goods to the consumer in the most economical manner so that the benefits of low cost production may reach him.
These fundamentals are all summed up in the single word 'service'… The service starts with discovering what people need and then supplying that need according to the principles that have just been given.”

“We have only started on our development of our country — we have not as yet, with all our talk of wonderful progress, done more than scratch the surface. The progress has been wonderful enough — but when we compare what we have done with what there is to do, then our past accomplishments are as nothing. When we consider that more power is used merely in ploughing the soil than is used in all the industrial establishments of the country put together, an inkling comes of how much opportunity there b ahead. And now, with so many countries of the world in ferment and with so much unrest everywhere, is an excellent time to suggest something of the things that may be done — in the light of what has been done.
When one speaks of increasing power, machinery, and industry there comes up a picture of a cold, metallic sort of world in which great factories will drive away the trees, the flowers, the birds, and the green fields. And that then we shall have a world composed of metal machines and human machines. With all of that I do not agree. I think that unless we know more about machines and their use, unless we better understand the mechanical portion of life, we cannot have the time to enjoy the trees, and the birds, and the flowers, and the green fields.”

“I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across there and I don’t care. I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. 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 damn is the history we make today.”

“When I see an Alfa Romeo go by, I tip my hat.”

“There's just one thing that's permanent in this world, and that's change. And when a man gets too old to change, why, then, he dies. And after that, who knows? Do we go on somewhere else? We'd all like to think so; it seems sometimes as though something inside us was telling us that we do. But if we do live on, then one thing is sure: The fellows who are afraid all the time that they may lose what they've got will lose out over there just the way they lose out here. And the big prizes will keep right on going to the fellows who do their duty and have faith. That's all there is to happiness, according to my way of thinking—just doing your duty and having faith.”

“There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for one hundred years.”

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

“The average man won't really do a day's work unless he is caught and cannot get out of it. There is plenty of work to do if people would do it.”

“The man who has the largest capacity for work and thought is the man who is bound to succeed.”

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