Henry Ford

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 great need of the world has always been for leaders. With more leaders we could have more industry. More industry, more employment and comfort for all.

Hard knocks have a place and value, but hard thinking goes farther in less time.

The Bible does not need advertising by me, but I wish more people could be persuaded to read it. Perhaps if they had been, we should not have this war on our hands. For greed and idleness brought it on.

From the start I had my own ideas about how the business should run. I wanted it to benefit everybody who contributed to its success-stockholders, labor and the American public.

I believe that any stock that is sold should have real value as automobile or bushel of potatoes, and stock market should be run as a vegetable market.

There is safety in small beginnings and there is unlimited capital in the experience gained by growing.

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.

You are so much more than what people have done to you, and to let that define you, would be a tragedy.

Love thy neighbour as yourself, but choose your neighbourhood.

Respect for sovereignity, for privacy, for total independence. Gentle alliances against loneliness, they were, cool rational love-affairs without the love.

I can visualize the time when almost every family will have a small plane in their back yard.

My philosophy is to have a really good time and never to let anything stop me from doing what I want to do.

Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised.

I am become death, shatterer of worlds.

A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding.

The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball.

I’ve learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

History is more or less bunk.

Maybe in the 90s or possibly in the next century people will look upon the 80s as the age of masturbation, when it was taken to the limit; that might be all that’s going on right now in a big way.