Henry Ford

That’s the way to study history-by noting evolutionary processes.

War is not a matter for the professional pacifist or militarist. It is for the unprofessional people. They finance and fight it, they bear its losses. Therefore, they should have the deciding voice concerning it. To do this, they require all the information upon which decisions are made. They should know in a difference, whether it is soluble by rational intelligence, or inevitable by force. Not once in a thousand instances would our people (this may not be true of all peoples, however) approve an offensive war. Never would they be lax in defensive action. For this is their country. However, most of their enemies are within it.

To resent efficiency is a mark of inefficiency.

I foresee the time when industry shall no longer denude the forests which require generations to mature, nor use up the mines which were ages in making, but shall draw its raw material largely from the annual produce of the fields. I am convinced that we shall be able to get out of yearly crops most of the basic materials which we now get from forest and mine.

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: make the best quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

Improvements have been coming so quickly that the past is being lost to the rising generation, and it can be preserved only by putting it in a form where it may be seen and felt. That is the reason behind this collection.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

Write drunk, revise sober.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.

Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.