Charles Kettering

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.

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

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."

A research problem is not solved by apparatus; it is solved in a man's head.

My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.

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.

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

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.

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.

We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.

here is a great difference between knowing a thing and understanding it. You can know a lot and not really understand anything.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.

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

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