Charles Kettering Quotes

Modern psychology teaches that experience is not merely the best teacher, but the only possible teacher.. There is no war between theory and practice. The most valuable experience demands both, and the theory should supplement the practice and not precede it.

All human development, no matter what form it takes, must be outside the rules; otherwise we would never have anything new.

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

No one would have crossed the ocean if he could have gotten off the ship in the storm.

An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously.

Nothing ever built arose to touch the skies unless some man dreamed that it should, some man believed that it could, and some man willed that it must.

Research is an organized method for keeping you reasonably dissatisfied with what you have.

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."

Every great improvement has come after repeated failures. Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

We have a lot of people revolutionizing the world because they've never had to present a working model.

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

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.

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

We work day after day, not to finish things; but to make the future better ... because we will spend the rest of our lives there.

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

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.

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

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

Every honest researcher I know admits he's just a professional amateur. He's doing whatever he's doing for the first time. That makes him an amateur. He has sense enough to know that he's going to have a lot of trouble, so that makes him a professional.

Learn how to fail intelligently.

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.

The price of progress is trouble.

Research means that you don't know, but are willing to find out.

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

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

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

A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.

If I have had any success, it's due to luck, but I notice the harder I work, the luckier I get.

What I believe is that, by proper effort, we make the future almost anything we want to make it.

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.

In many ways ideas are more important than people - they are much more permanent.

Research is industrial prospecting. The oil prospectors use every scientific means to find new paying wells. Oil is found by each one of a number of methods. My own group of men are prospecting in a different field, using every possible scientific means. We believe there are still things left to be discovered. We have only stumbled upon a few barrels of physical laws from the great pool of knowledge. Some day we are going to hit a gusher.

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

Don't bring anything to me but trouble.

One fails forward toward success.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.