Henry Ford

Only one thing makes prosperity, and that is work.

The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.

Greatest thing in life is experience. Even mistakes have value.

Much depends on people knowing what opportunity means; it doesn’t mean a silver platter, it oftener means a spade. Self-help means something sterner than ‘help yourself’–reach over and take it.

The only true test of values, either of men or of things, is that of their ability to make the world a better place in which to live.

Should a man quit at 40 he is failure-Retire at that age is sorry failure.

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!

I’d never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds bigheaded, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn’t meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it.

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet.

Experience shows that the frequent use of severe punishment has never rendered a people better. The death of a criminal is a less effective means of restraining crimes than the permanent example of a man deprived of his liberty during the whole of his life to make amends for the injury he has done to the public.

The little I know I owe to my ignorance.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.

Don’t be afraid of the space between your dreams and reality. If you can dream it, you can make it so.

Insight emerges out of silence.

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it’s only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.

Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.

Understanding is simple. Knowing is complicated.

When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

Do you realize if it weren’t for Edison we’d be watching TV by candlelight?