My Life and Work quotes

And that then we shall have a world composed of metal machines and human machines. With all of that I do not agree.

I think that unless we know more about machines and their use, unless we better understand the mechanical portion of life, we cannot have the time to enjoy the trees, and the birds, and the flowers, and the green fields.

I think that we have already done too much toward banishing the pleasant things from life by thinking that there is some opposition between living and providing the means of living.

We waste so much time and energy that we have little left over in which to enjoy ourselves.

Power and machinery, money and goods, are useful only as they set us free to live. They are but means to an end.

For instance, I do not consider the machines which bear my name simply as machines. If that was all there was to it I would do something else.

I have no quarrel with the general attitude of scoffing at new ideas. It is better to be skeptical of all new ideas and to insist upon being shown rather than to rush around in a continuous brainstorm after every new idea.

Skepticism, if by that we mean cautiousness, is the balance wheel of civilization.

Most of the present acute troubles of the world arise out of taking on new ideas without first carefully investigating to discover if they are good ideas.

Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea.

Almost any one can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product.

I am now most interested in fully demonstrating that the ideas we have put into practice are capable of the largest application—that they have nothing peculiarly to do with motor cars or tractors but form something in the nature of a universal code.

I think there is entirely too much attempt at reforming in the world and that we pay too much attention to reformers. We have two kinds of reformers. Both are nuisances. The man who calls himself a reformer wants to smash things.

He is the sort of man who would tear up a whole shirt because the collar button did not fit the buttonhole. It would never occur to him to enlarge the buttonhole.

This sort of reformer never under any circumstances knows what he is doing. Experience and reform do not go together. A reformer cannot keep his zeal at white heat in the presence of a fact. He must discard all facts.

We have passed through a period of fireworks of every description, and the making of a great many idealistic maps of progress. We did not get anywhere.

It was a convention, not a march.

Lovely things were said, but when we got home we found the furnace out.

We have passed through a period of fireworks of every description, and the making of a great many idealistic maps of progress. We did not get anywhere. It was a convention, not a march.

Lovely things were said, but when we got home we found the furnace out.

Reactionaries have frequently taken advantage of the recoil from such a period, and they have promised "the good old times"—which usually means the bad old abuses—and because they are perfectly void of vision they are sometimes regarded as "practical men."

There is plenty of work to do. Business is merely work. Speculation in things already produced—that is not business. It is just more or less respectable graft. But it cannot be legislated out of existence. Laws can do very little.

Law never does anything constructive. It can never be more than a policeman, and so it is a waste of time to look to our state capitals or to Washington to do that which law was not designed to do.

As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty spread and special privilege grow.

The moment the people become adjuncts to government, then the law of retribution begins to work, for such a relation is unnatural, immoral, and inhuman. We cannot live without business and we cannot live without government.

Business and government are necessary as servants, like water and grain; as masters they overturn the natural order.

The welfare of the country is squarely up to us as individuals. That is where it should be and that is where it is safest. Governments can promise something for nothing but they cannot deliver.

Our help does not come from Washington, but from ourselves; our help may, however, go to Washington as a sort of central distribution point where all our efforts are coordinated for the general good.

We may help the Government; the Government cannot help us.

The slogan of "less government in business and more business in government" is a very good one, not mainly on account of business or government, but on account of the people. Business is not the reason why the United States was founded.

The ordinary theories which promise everything to everybody, and demand nothing from anybody, are promptly denied by the instincts of the ordinary man, even when he does not find reasons against them. He knows they are wrong. That is enough.

The present order, always clumsy, often stupid, and in many ways imperfect, has this advantage over any other—it works.

Doubtless our order will merge by degrees into another, and the new one will also work—but not so much by reason of what it is as by reason of what men will bring into it.

He should have the freedom of starvation. We are not getting anywhere when we insist that every man ought to have more than he deserves to have—just because some do get more than they deserve to have.

There can be no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist that all men are equal.

Most certainly all men are not equal, and any democratic conception which strives to make men equal is only an effort to block progress. Men cannot be of equal service. The men of larger ability are less numerous than the men of smaller ability;

The public no longer had to be "catered to." There was even a "public be damned" attitude in many places. It was intensely bad for business. Some men called that abnormal condition "prosperity." It was not prosperity— it was just a needless money chase.

Money chasing is not business.

It is very easy, unless one keeps a plan thoroughly in mind, to get burdened with money and then, in an effort to make more money, to forget all about selling to the people what they want. Business on a money-making basis is most insecure.

That is bad for business. Monopoly is bad for business. Profiteering is bad for business. The lack of necessity to hustle is bad for business.

Business is never as healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching for what it gets.

Things were coming too easily. There was a let-down of the principle that an honest relation ought to obtain between values and prices. The public no longer had to be "catered to." There was even a "public be damned" attitude in many places.

They said that they had entered into a "period of depression." Really they had not. They were simply trying to pit nonsense against sense which is something that cannot successfully be done.

Being greedy for money is the surest way not to get it, but when one serves for the sake of service—for the satisfaction of doing that which one believes to be right—then money abundantly takes care of itself.

Money comes naturally as the result of service. And it is absolutely necessary to have money. But we do not want to forget that the end of money is not ease but the opportunity to perform more service.

Money comes naturally as the result of service. And it is absolutely necessary to have money. But we do not want to forget that the end of money is not ease but the opportunity to perform more service.

In my mind nothing is more abhorrent than a life of ease. None of us has any right to ease.

There is no place in civilization for the idler. Any scheme looking to abolishing money is only making affairs more complex, for we must have a measure. That our present system of money is a satisfactory basis for exchange is a matter of grave doubt.

In transportation why put extra weight in a machine? Why not add it to the load that the machine is designed to carry?

Fat men cannot run as fast as thin men but we build most of our vehicles as though dead-weight fat increased speed!

A deal of poverty grows out of the carriage of excess weight. Some day we shall discover how further to eliminate weight. Take wood, for example. For certain purposes wood is now the best substance we know, but wood is extremely wasteful.

Lack of knowledge of what is going on and lack of knowledge of what the job really is and the best way of doing it are the reasons why farming is thought not to pay. Nothing could pay the way farming is conducted.

The farmer follows luck and his forefathers.

He does not know how economically to produce, and he does not know how to market. A manufacturer who knew how neither to produce nor to market would not long stay in business.

All of which being translated means that it is what a thing does—not what it is supposed to do—that matters. What is the use of putting a tremendous force behind a blunt chisel if a light blow on a sharp chisel will do the work?

The chisel is there to cut, not to be hammered.

The hammering is only incidental to the job. So if we want to work why not concentrate on the work and do it in the quickest possible fashion? The cutting edge of merchandising is the point where the product touches the consumer.

The essence of my idea then is that waste and greed block the delivery of true service. Both waste and greed are unnecessary. Waste is due largely to not understanding what one does, or being careless in doing of it.

Greed is merely a species of nearsightedness.

I have striven toward manufacturing with a minimum of waste, both of materials and of human effort, and then toward distribution at a minimum of profit, depending for the total profit upon the volume of distribution.

1. An absence of fear of the future and of veneration for the past. One who fears the future, who fears failure, limits his activities.

Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail.

What is past is useful only as it suggests ways and means for progress.

I had a kind of workshop with odds and ends of metal for tools before I had anything else. In those days we did not have the toys of to-day; what we had were home made.

My toys were all tools—they still are! And every fragment of machinery was a treasure.

The biggest event of those early years was meeting with a road engine about eight miles out of Detroit one day when we were driving to town. I was then twelve years old.

There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things. It is not possible to learn from books how everything is made—and a real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made.

Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer.

He gets ideas from them, and if he has any brains he will apply those ideas.

All the wise people demonstrated conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never thought that it might carve out a career for itself.

That is the way with wise people—they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations.

That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work.

That is the way with wise people—they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom.

If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts.

They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work.

I cannot say that it was hard work.

No work with interest is ever hard.

I always am certain of results. They always come if you work hard enough. But it was a very great thing to have my wife even more confident than I was. She has always been that way.

And then there was trouble with the police. I do not know quite why, for my impression is that there were no speed-limit laws in those days.

Anyway, I had to get a special permit from the mayor and thus for a time enjoyed the distinction of being the only licensed chauffeur in America.

I ran that machine about one thousand miles through 1895 and 1896 and then sold it to Charles Ainsley of Detroit for two hundred dollars. That was my first sale. I had built the car not to sell but only to experiment with.

It might be thought something of a step, for I had no personal funds. What money was left over from living was all used in experimenting. But my wife agreed that the automobile could not be given up—that we had to make or break.

There was no "demand" for automobiles—there never is for a new article.

They were accepted in much the fashion as was more recently the airplane. At first the "horseless carriage" was considered merely a freak notion and many wise people explained with particularity why it could never be more than a toy.

Therefore they say that a proper charge against the operating expenses of a business is the interest on this money. This idea is at the root of many business failures and most service failures.

Money is not worth a particular amount. As money it is not worth anything, for it will do nothing of itself.

The only use of money is to buy tools to work with or the product of tools. Therefore money is worth what it will help you to produce or buy and no more.

Also it did not seem to me to be the way to make money. I have yet to have it demonstrated that it is the way. For the only foundation of real business is service.

A manufacturer is not through with his customer when a sale is completed. He has then only started with his customer.

In the case of an automobile the sale of the machine is only something in the nature of an introduction.

… of a name because someone thought they could be managed just as they were always managed, and though the management may have been most excellent in its day, its excellence consisted in its alertness to its day, and not in slavish following of its yesterdays.

Life, as I see it, is not a location, but a journey.

Even the man who most feels himself "settled" is not settled—he is probably sagging back. Everything is in flux, and was meant to be. Life flows.

Life, as I see it, is not a location, but a journey. Even the man who most feels himself "settled" is not settled—he is probably sagging back. Everything is in flux, and was meant to be.

Life flows. We may live at the same number of the street, but it is never the same man who lives there.

And out of the delusion that life is a battle that may be lost by a false move grows, I have noticed, a great love for regularity. Men fall into the half-alive habit.

Perhaps it is true that the majority of men need the restraint of public opinion. Public opinion may keep a man better than he would otherwise be—if not better morally, at least better as far as his social desirability is concerned.

But it is not a bad thing to be a fool for righteousness' sake.

The best of it is that such fools usually live long enough to prove that they were not fools—or the work they have begun lives long enough to prove they were not foolish.

During this time of reflection I was far from idle. We were going ahead with a four-cylinder motor and the building of a pair of big racing cars. I had plenty of time, for I never left my business.

I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and dream of it by night.

It is nice to plan to do one's work in office hours, to take up the work in the morning, to drop it in the evening—and not have a care until the next morning.

And the price has to be reduced (this is very important) because of the manufacturing economies that have come about and not because the falling demand by the public indicates that it is not satisfied with the price.

The public should always be wondering how it is possible to give so much for the money.

Standardization (to use the word as I understand it) is not just taking one's best selling article and concentrating on it.

These were. I put in four great big cylinders giving 80 H.P.—which up to that time had been unheard of.

The roar of those cylinders alone was enough to half kill a man. There was only one seat. One life to a car was enough.

I tried out the cars. Cooper tried out the cars. We let them out at full speed. I cannot quite describe the sensation. Going over Niagara Falls would have been but a pastime after a ride in one of them.

There was only one seat. One life to a car was enough. I tried out the cars. Cooper tried out the cars. We let them out at full speed. I cannot quite describe the sensation.

Going over Niagara Falls would have been but a pastime after a ride in one of them.

I did not want to take the responsibility of racing the "999" which we put up first, neither did Cooper. Cooper said he knew a man who lived on speed, that nothing could go too fast for him.

It was not known how much speed a motor car could develop. No one knew better than Oldfield what the turns meant and as he took his seat, while I was cranking the car for the start, he remarked cheerily: "

Well, this chariot may kill me, but they will say afterward that I was going like hell when she took me over the bank.

"

Weight may be desirable in a steam roller but nowhere else. Strength has nothing to do with weight. The mentality of the man who does things in the world is agile, light, and strong.

The most beautiful things in the world are those from which all excess weight has been eliminated.

Strength is never just weight—either in men or things. Whenever any one suggests to me that I might increase weight or add a part, I look into decreasing weight and eliminating a part!

The mentality of the man who does things in the world is agile, light, and strong. The most beautiful things in the world are those from which all excess weight has been eliminated. Strength is never just weight—either in men or things.

Whenever any one suggests to me that I might increase weight or add a part, I look into decreasing weight and eliminating a part!

The car that I designed was lighter than any car that had yet been made. It would have been lighter if I had known how to make it so—later I got the materials to make the lighter car.

… hands of a man named Cantello who took out the motor, hitched it to a water pump, rigged up shafts on the chassis and now, while the motor chugs away at the pumping of water, the chassis drawn by a burro acts as a buggy.

The moral, of course, is that you can dissect a Ford but you cannot kill it.

In our first advertisement we said:

It is my ambition to have every piece of machinery, or other non-consumable product that I turn out, so strong and so well made that no one ought ever to have to buy a second one.

A good machine of any kind ought to last as long as a good watch.

In the second year we scattered our energies among three models. We made a four-cylinder touring car, "Model B," which sold for two thousand dollars; "Model C," which was a slightly improved "Model A" and sold at fifty dollars more than the former price;

That was supposed to be good business. It is the same idea that women submit to in their clothing and hats.

That is not service—it seeks only to provide something new, not something better.

It is extraordinary how firmly rooted is the notion that business—continuous selling—depends not on satisfying the customer once and for all, but on first getting his money for one article and then persuading him he ought to buy a new and different one.

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When one of my cars breaks down I know I am to blame.

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That works both ways and applies to everything.

The less complex an article, the easier it is to make, the cheaper it may be sold, and therefore the greater number may be sold.

It is not necessary to go into the technical details of the construction but perhaps this is as good a place as any to review the various models, because "Model T" was the last of the models and the policy which it brought about took …

The salesmen, before I had announced the policy, were spurred by the great sales to think that even greater sales might be had if only we had more models.

It is strange how, just as soon as an article becomes successful, somebody starts to think that it would be more successful if only it were different.

There is a tendency to keep monkeying with styles and to spoil a good thing by changing it. The salesmen were insistent on increasing the line.

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Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.

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If Ford does that he will be out of business in six months.

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That is one of the troubles with extensive records.

If you keep on recording all of your failures you will shortly have a list showing that there is nothing left for you to try

—whereas it by no means follows because one man has failed in a certain method that another man will not succeed.

But at the River Rouge plant we are casting directly from cupolas that are filled from the blast furnaces. Then, too, a record of failures—particularly if it is a dignified and well-authenticated record—deters a young man from trying.

We get some of our best results from letting fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

None of our men are "experts." We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert—because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job.

A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is.

Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible.

The moment one gets into the "expert" state of mind a great number of things become impossible.

Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible.

The moment one gets into the "expert" state of mind a great number of things become impossible.

I refuse to recognize that there are impossibilities. I cannot discover that any one knows enough about anything on this earth definitely to say what is and what is not possible.

Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the "expert" state of mind a great number of things become impossible.

I refuse to recognize that there are impossibilities.

I cannot discover that any one knows enough about anything on this earth definitely to say what is and what is not possible. The right kind of experience, the right kind of technical training, ought to enlarge the mind and reduce the number of impossibilities.

It is the business of those who plan the entire work to see that all of the departments are working properly toward the same end. It is not necessary to have meetings to establish good feeling between individuals or departments.

It is not necessary for people to love each other in order to work together.

Too much good fellowship may indeed be a very bad thing, for it may lead to one man trying to cover up the faults of another. That is bad for both men.

Now a business, in my way of thinking, is not a machine.

It is a collection of people who are brought together to do work and not to write letters to one another.

It is not necessary for any one department to know what any other department is doing. If a man is doing his work he will not have time to take up any other work.

The men who bear titles now and are worth anything are forgetting their titles and are down in the foundation of business looking for the weak spots. They are back again in the places from which they rose—trying to reconstruct from the bottom up.

And when a man is really at work, he needs no title. His work honours him.

All of our people come into the factory or the offices through the employment departments. As I have said, we do not hire experts—neither do we hire men on past experiences or for any position other than the lowest.

As I have said, we do not hire experts—neither do we hire men on past experiences or for any position other than the lowest. Since we do not take a man on his past history, we do not refuse him because of his past history.

I never met a man who was thoroughly bad. There is always some good in him—if he gets a chance.

That is the reason we do not care in the least about a man's antecedents—we do not hire a man's history, we hire the man. If he has been in jail, that is no reason to say that he will be in jail again.

Everything that we have developed has been done by men who have qualified themselves with us. We fortunately did not inherit any traditions and we are not founding any. If we have a tradition it is this:

Everything can always be done better than it is being done.

That pressing always to do work better and faster solves nearly every factory problem. A department gets its standing on its rate of production. The rate of production and the cost of production are distinct elements.

We do not want any hard, man-killing work about the place, and there is now very little of it. And usually it so works out that adopting the way which is easier on the men also decreases the cost.

There is most intimate connection between decency and good business.

We also investigate down to the last decimal whether it is cheaper to make or to buy a part.

… one another, but they are scientifically arranged, not only in the sequence of operations, but to give every man and every machine every square inch that he requires and, if possible, not a square inch, and certainly not a square foot, more than he requires.

Our factory buildings are not intended to be used as parks.

The close placing requires a maximum of safeguards and ventilation.

The bosses have to watch for that, and they catch most of the offenders. New machines are tested in every way before they are permitted to be installed. As a result we have practically no serious accidents.

Industry needs not exact a human toll.

There is nothing to running a business by custom—to saying: "I pay the going rate of wages." The same man would not so easily say: "I have nothing better or cheaper to sell than any one has."

He may himself be sole owner of the resources of the business and sole director of its operations, but only while he remains sole manager and sole producer can he claim complete independence.

No man is independent as long as he has to depend on another man to help him.

It is a reciprocal relation—the boss is the partner of his worker, the worker is partner of his boss. And such being the case, it is useless for one group or the other to assume that it is the one indispensable unit. Both are indispensable.

"What ought the employer to pay?"—"What ought the employee to receive?" These are but minor questions. The basic question is "What can the business stand?" Certainly no business can stand outgo that exceeds its income.

When you pump water out of a well at a faster rate than the water flows in, the well goes dry.

And when the well runs dry, those who depend on it go thirsty. And if, perchance, they imagine they can pump one well dry and then jump to some other well, it is only a matter of time when all the wells will be dry.

If it is not created there it cannot get into pay envelopes. There will never be a system invented which will do away with the necessity of work. Nature has seen to that. Idle hands and minds were never intended for any one of us.

Work is our sanity, our self-respect, our salvation. So far from being a curse, work is the greatest blessing.

Exact social justice flows only out of honest work. The man who contributes much should take away much. Therefore no element of charity is present in the paying of wages.

This is a good thing for him and a good thing for the business.

The man who does not get a certain satisfaction out of his day's work is losing the best part of his pay.

For the day's work is a great thing—a very great thing! It is at the very foundation of the world; it is the basis of our self-respect. And the employer ought constantly to put in a harder day's work than any of his men.

If we attempt to regulate wages on living costs, we get nowhere. The cost of living is a result and we cannot expect to keep a result constant if we keep altering the factors which produce the result.

When we try to regulate wages according to the cost of living, we are imitating a dog chasing his tail.

And, anyhow, who is competent to say just what kind of living we shall base the costs on? Let us broaden our view and see what a wage is to the workmen—and what it ought to be.

Were it otherwise, neither the workman nor ourselves would know whether or not wages were being earned. There must be a fixed day's work before a real wage can be paid.

Watchmen are paid for presence. Workmen are paid for work.

Having these facts in hand we announced and put into operation in January, 1914, a kind of profit-sharing plan in which the minimum wage for any class of work and under certain conditions was five dollars a day.

There is a pleasure in feeling that you have made others happy—that you have lessened in some degree the burdens of your fellow-men—that you have provided a margin out of which may be had pleasure and saving.

Good-will is one of the few really important assets of life.

A determined man can win almost anything that he goes after, but unless, in his getting, he gains good will he has not profited much.

We made the change not merely because we wanted to pay higher wages and thought we could pay them. We wanted to pay these wages so that the business would be on a lasting foundation. We were not distributing anything—we were building for the future.

A low wage business is always insecure.

Probably few industrial announcements have created a more world-wide comment than did this one, and hardly any one got the facts quite right. Workmen quite generally believed that they were going to get five dollars a day, regardless of what work they did.

If, in the beginning, we had simply put the increase in the pay envelopes, then very likely the work standards would have broken down. The pay of about half the men was doubled in the new plan; it might have been taken as "easy money."

The thought of easy money breaks down work.

There is a danger in too rapidly raising the pay of any man—whether he previously received one dollar or one hundred dollars a day.

In fact, if the salary of a hundred-dollar-a-day man were increased overnight to three hundred dollars a day he would probably make a bigger fool of himself than the working man whose pay is increased from one dollar to three dollars an hour.

The man with the larger amount of money has larger opportunity to make a fool of himself.

In this first plan the standards insisted upon were not petty—although sometimes they may have been administered in a petty fashion. We had about fifty investigators in the Social Department;

We may also have great stocks of goods at too high prices. That is not overproduction—it is either bad manufacturing or bad financing. Is business good or bad according to the dictates of fate? Must we accept the conditions as inevitable?

Business is good or bad as we make it so.

The only reason for growing crops, for mining, or for manufacturing, is that people may eat, keep warm, have clothing to wear, and articles to use.

Then why flounder around waiting for good business? Get the costs down by better management. Get the prices down to the buying power.

Cutting wages is the easiest and most slovenly way to handle the situation, not to speak of its being an inhuman way.

It is, in effect, throwing upon labour the incompetency of the managers of the business.

Cutting wages is the easiest and most slovenly way to handle the situation, not to speak of its being an inhuman way. It is, in effect, throwing upon labour the incompetency of the managers of the business.

If we only knew it, every depression is a challenge to every manufacturer to put more brains into his business—to overcome by management what other people try to overcome by wage reduction.

To tamper with wages before all else is changed, is to evade the real issue. And if the real issue is tackled first, no reduction of wages may be necessary. That has been my experience.

People do not stay put. That is the trouble with all the framers of Socialistic and Communistic, and of all other plans for the ideal regulation of society. They all presume that people will stay put.

The reactionary has the same idea. He insists that everyone ought to stay put. Nobody does, and for that I am thankful.

Consumption varies according to the price and the quality, and nobody knows or can figure out what future consumption will amount to, because every time a price is lowered a new stratum of buying power is reached.

But as far as we are concerned, we do not look forward to that condition with fear—we look forward to it with great satisfaction.

Nothing could be more splendid than a world in which everybody has all that he wants.

Our fear is that this condition will be too long postponed. As to our own products, that condition is very far away. We do not know how many motor cars a family will desire to use of the particular kind that we make.

It is not good management to take profits out of the workers or the buyers; make management produce the profits.

Don't cheapen the product; don't cheapen the wage; don't overcharge the public.

Put brains into the method, and more brains, and still more brains—do things better than ever before; and by this means all parties to business are served and benefited.

I regard a bank principally as a place in which it is safe and convenient to keep money. The minutes we spend on a competitor's business we lose on our own. The minutes we spend in becoming expert in finance we lose in production.

The place to finance a manufacturing business is the shop, and not the bank.

I would not say that a man in business needs to know nothing at all about finance, but he is better off knowing too little than too much, for if he becomes too expert he will get into the way of thinking that he can …

The thing is to keep money and borrowing and finance generally in their proper place, and in order to do that one has to consider exactly for what the money is needed and how it is going to be paid off.

Money is only a tool in business. It is just a part of the machinery.

You might as well borrow 100,000 lathes as $100,000 if the trouble is inside your business. More lathes will not cure it; neither will more money. Only heavier doses of brains and thought and wise courage can cure.

Borrowing for expansion is one thing; borrowing to make up for mismanagement and waste is quite another. You do not want money for the latter—for the reason that money cannot do the job.

Waste is corrected by economy; mismanagement is corrected by brains.

Neither of these correctives has anything to do with money. Indeed, money under certain circumstances is their enemy.

Indeed, money under certain circumstances is their enemy. And many a business man thanks his stars for the pinch which showed him that his best capital was in his own brains and not in bank loans.

Borrowing under certain circumstances is just like a drunkard taking another drink to cure the effect of the last one.

It does not do what it is expected to do. It simply increases the difficulty. Tightening up the loose places in a business is much more profitable than any amount of new capital at 7 per cent.

… new price, the income would be reduced forty million dollars—which is an interesting mathematical calculation that has nothing whatsoever to do with business, because unless you reduce the price of an article the sales do not continuously increase and therefore the business has no stability.

If a business is not increasing, it is bound to be decreasing, and a decreasing business always needs a lot of financing.

Old-time business went on the doctrine that prices should always be kept up to the highest point at which people will buy. Really modern business has to take the opposite view.

It is simply that no company can be said to be stable which is not so well managed that it can afford a man an opportunity to do a great deal of work and therefore to earn a good wage.

There is something sacred about wages—they represent homes and families and domestic destinies.

People ought to tread very carefully when approaching wages. On the cost sheet, wages are mere figures; out in the world, wages are bread boxes and coal bins, babies' cradles and children's education—family comforts and contentment.

There is something sacred about wages—they represent homes and families and domestic destinies. People ought to tread very carefully when approaching wages.

On the cost sheet, wages are mere figures; out in the world, wages are bread boxes and coal bins, babies' cradles and children's education—family comforts and contentment.

On the other hand, there is something just as sacred about capital which is used to provide the means by which work can be made productive. Nobody is helped if our industries are sucked dry of their life-blood.

Their whole business philosophy is: "Get while the getting is good." They are the speculators, the exploiters, the no-good element that is always injuring legitimate business. There is nothing to be expected from them. They have no vision.

They cannot see beyond their own cash registers.

These people can talk more easily about a 10 or 20 per cent. cut in wages than they can about a 10 or 20 per cent. cut in profits.

We cut our office forces in halves and offered the office workers better jobs in the shops. Most of them took the jobs. We abolished every order blank and every form of statistics that did not directly aid in the production of a car.

We had been collecting tons of statistics because they were interesting. But statistics will not construct automobiles—so out they went.

We took out 60 per cent. of our telephone extensions. Only a comparatively few men in any organization need telephones. We formerly had a foreman for every five men; now we have a foreman for every twenty men. The other foremen are working on machines.

We cut our office forces in halves and offered the office workers better jobs in the shops.

Most of them took the jobs.

We abolished every order blank and every form of statistics that did not directly aid in the production of a car. We had been collecting tons of statistics because they were interesting. But statistics will not construct automobiles—so out they went.

we should employ fewer men, and in short, should not be able to serve to the utmost. You will note that the financiers proposed to cure by lending money and not by bettering methods.

They did not suggest putting in an engineer; they wanted to put in a treasurer.

And that is the danger of having bankers in business. They think solely in terms of money. They think of a factory as making money, not goods. They want to watch the money, not the efficiency of production.

Men will do business with one another. There will be money and there will be need of masters of the mechanism of money. Nothing is going to depart but the knots and tangles. There will be some readjustments, of course.

Banks will no longer be the masters of industry. They will be the servants of industry.

Business will control money instead of money controlling business. The ruinous interest system will be greatly modified. Banking will not be a risk, but a service.

The wealth of the world neither consists in nor is adequately represented by the money of the world.

Gold itself is not a valuable commodity. It is no more wealth than hat checks are hats.

But it can be so manipulated, as the sign of wealth, as to give its owners or controllers the whip-hand over the credit which producers of real wealth require. Dealing in money, the commodity of exchange, is a very lucrative business.

The poverty of the world is seldom caused by lack of goods but by a "money stringency." Commercial competition between nations, which leads to international rivalry and ill-will, which in their turn breed wars— these are some of the human significations of these facts.

Thus poverty and war, two great preventable evils, grow on a single stem.

Let us see if a beginning toward a better method cannot be made.

There comes a violent reaction against extravagance—the mind catches hold of the idea of "economy." But it only flies from a greater to a lesser evil; it does not make the full journey from error to truth.

Economy is the rule of half-alive minds.

There can be no doubt that it is better than waste; neither can there be any doubt that it is not as good as use. People who pride themselves on their economy take it as a virtue.

We all know "economical people" who seem to be niggardly even about the amount of air they breathe and the amount of appreciation they will allow themselves to give to anything. They shrivel—body and soul.

Economy is waste: it is waste of the juices of life, the sap of living.

For there are two kinds of waste—that of the prodigal who throws his substance away in riotous living, and that of the sluggard who allows his substance to rot from non-use. The rigid economizer is in danger of being classed with the sluggard.

You are not "saving" when you prevent yourself from becoming more productive. You are really taking away from your ultimate capital; you are reducing the value of one of nature's investments. The principle of use is the true guide.

Use is positive, active, life-giving. Use is alive.

Use adds to the sum of good.

You will find the smaller communities living along in unison with the seasons, having neither extreme poverty nor wealth—none of the violent plagues of upheave and unrest which afflict our great populations.

There is something about a city of a million people which is untamed and threatening.

Thirty miles away, happy and contented villages read of the ravings of the city! A great city is really a helpless mass. Everything it uses is carried to it. Stop transport and the city stops. It lives off the shelves of stores.

If we have sympathy enough for people to help them out of their troubles, surely we ought to have sympathy enough to keep them out.

It is easy to give; it is harder to make giving unnecessary.

To make the giving unnecessary we must look beyond the individual to the cause of his misery—not hesitating, of course, to relieve him in the meantime, but not stopping with mere temporary relief.

I have no patience with professional charity, or with any sort of commercialized humanitarianism.

The moment human helpfulness is systematized, organized, commercialized, and professionalized, the heart of it is extinguished, and it becomes a cold and clammy thing.

Real human helpfulness is never card-catalogued or advertised. There are more orphan children being cared for in the private homes of people who love them than in the institutions.

We need more constructive thinking in public service. We need a kind of "universal training" in economic facts. The over-reaching ambitions of speculative capital, as well as the unreasonable demands of irresponsible labour, are due to ignorance of the economic basis of life.

Nobody can get more out of life than life can produce—yet nearly everybody thinks he can.

Speculative capital wants more; labour wants more; the source of raw material wants more; and the purchasing public wants more. A family knows that it cannot live beyond its income; even the children know that.

They have not even given themselves a chance really to fail; they have not given their vision a chance to be proved or disproved. They have simply let themselves be beaten by the natural difficulties that attend every kind of effort.

More men are beaten than fail.

It is not wisdom they need or money, or brilliance, or "pull," but just plain gristle and bone. This rude, simple, primitive power which we call "stick-to-it-iveness" is the uncrowned king of the world of endeavour. People are utterly wrong in their slant upon things.

More men are beaten than fail.

It is not wisdom they need or money, or brilliance, or "pull," but just plain gristle and bone.

This rude, simple, primitive power which we call "stick-to-it-iveness" is the uncrowned king of the world of endeavour. People are utterly wrong in their slant upon things. They see the successes that men have made and somehow they appear to be easy.

People are utterly wrong in their slant upon things. They see the successes that men have made and somehow they appear to be easy. But that is a world away from the facts.

It is failure that is easy. Success is always hard.

A man can fail in ease; he can succeed only by paying out all that he has and is. It is this which makes success so pitiable a thing if it be in lines that are not useful and uplifting.

People are utterly wrong in their slant upon things. They see the successes that men have made and somehow they appear to be easy. But that is a world away from the facts. It is failure that is easy. Success is always hard.

A man can fail in ease; he can succeed only by paying out all that he has and is.

It is this which makes success so pitiable a thing if it be in lines that are not useful and uplifting.

Better still is for the man to come through himself and exceed himself by getting rid of his fears in the midst of the circumstances where his daily lot is cast.

Become a freeman in the place where you first surrendered your freedom. Win your battle where you lost it.

And you will come to see that, although there was much outside of you that was not right, there was more inside of you that was not right.

Let every American become steeled against coddling. Americans ought to resent coddling. It is a drug.

Stand up and stand out; let weaklings take charity.

Nothing in this country furnishes a better example of how a business may be turned from its function of service than do the railroads. We have a railroad problem, and much learned thought and discussion have been devoted to the solution of that problem.

With the lawyers and the financiers on the inside and various state commissions on the outside, the railway manager has little chance. That is the trouble with the railways.

Business cannot be conducted by law.

We have had the opportunity of demonstrating to ourselves what a freedom from the banker-legal mortmain means, in our experience with the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railway.

The natural ally of the banker is the lawyer. Such games as have been played on the railroads have needed expert legal advice.

Lawyers, like bankers, know absolutely nothing about business.

They imagine that a business is properly conducted if it keeps within the law or if the law can be altered or interpreted to suit the purpose in hand. They live on rules. The bankers took finance out of the hands of the managers.

The principles that we use in the big Highland Park plant seem to work equally well in every plant that we establish. It has never made any difference with us whether we multiplied what we were doing by five or five hundred.

Size is only a matter of the multiplication table, anyway.

The Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railway was organized some twenty-odd years ago and has been reorganized every few years since then. The last reorganization was in 1914. The war and the federal control of the railways interrupted the cycle of reorganization.

All of the rolling stock was in extremely bad condition and a good part of it would not run at all. All of the buildings were dirty, unpainted, and generally run down.

The roadbed was something more than a streak of rust and something less than a railway.

The repair shops were over-manned and under-machined. Practically everything connected with operation was conducted with a maximum of waste. There was, however, an exceedingly ample executive and administration department, and of course a legal department. The legal department alone cost in one month nearly $18,000.

All of the buildings were dirty, unpainted, and generally run down. The roadbed was something more than a streak of rust and something less than a railway.

The repair shops were over-manned and under-machined.

Practically everything connected with operation was conducted with a maximum of waste. There was, however, an exceedingly ample executive and administration department, and of course a legal department. The legal department alone cost in one month nearly $18,000.

And we are not pouring in great amounts of money. Everything is being done out of earnings. That is our policy. The trains must go through and on time. The time of freight movements has been cut down about two thirds.

A car on a siding is not just a car on a siding. It is a great big question mark.

Someone has to know why it is there. It used to take 8 or 9 days to get freight through to Philadelphia or New York; now it takes three and a half days. The organization is serving.

More than that, it is being done in many places. But it will not register its full effect on the transportation situation and upon the cost of living until it is done more widely and in more kinds of materials.

It is one of nature's compensations to withdraw prosperity from the business which does not serve.

We have found that on the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton we could, following our universal policy, reduce our rates and get more business. We made some cuts, but the Interstate Commerce Commission refused to allow them!

They stayed around a while, but where they are now I do not know. I shall not import any more.

Birds are entitled to live where they want to live.

Birds are the best of companions. We need them for their beauty and their companionship, and also we need them for the strictly economic reason that they destroy harmful insects.

This was a part of John Burroughs's sanity—he was not afraid to change his views.

He was a lover of Nature, not her dupe.

In the course of time he came to value and approve modern devices, and though this by itself is an interesting fact, it is not so interesting as the fact that he made this change after he was seventy years old.

John Burroughs was never too old to change. He kept growing to the last.

The man who is too set to change is dead already. The funeral is a mere detail.

If he talked more of one person than another, it was Emerson. Not only did he know Emerson by heart as an author, but he knew him by heart as a spirit. He taught me to know Emerson.

War fortunes are losing caste every day. Even greed will some day hesitate before the overwhelming unpopularity and opposition which will meet the war profiteer.

Business should be on the side of peace, because peace is business's best asset.

And, by the way, was inventive genius ever so sterile as it was during the war?

Hundreds of American fortunes date from the Civil War; thousands of new fortunes date from the World War. Nobody can deny that war is a profitable business for those who like that kind of money.

War is an orgy of money, just as it is an orgy of blood.

And we should not so easily be led into war if we considered what it is that makes a nation really great. It is not the amount of trade that makes a nation great.

this one for government; another for colonization; another for the sea; another for art and music; another for agriculture; another for business, and so on. Lincoln said that this nation could not survive half-slave and half-free.

The human race cannot forever exist half-exploiter and half-exploited.

Until we become buyers and sellers alike, producers and consumers alike, keeping the balance not for profit but for service, we are going to have topsy-turvy conditions.

An educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few dates in history—he is one who can accomplish things. A man who cannot think is not an educated man however many college degrees he may have acquired.

Thinking is the hardest work any one can do—which is probably the reason why we have so few thinkers.

There are two extremes to be avoided: one is the attitude of contempt toward education, the other is the tragic snobbery of assuming that marching through an educational system is a sure cure for ignorance and mediocrity.

You may fill your head with all the "facts" of all the ages, and your head may be just an overloaded fact-box when you get through. The point is this: Great piles of knowledge in the head are not the same as mental activity.

A man may be very learned and very useless. And then again, a man may be unlearned and very useful.

The object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking.

You may fill your head with all the "facts" of all the ages, and your head may be just an overloaded fact-box when you get through. The point is this:

Great piles of knowledge in the head are not the same as mental activity.

A man may be very learned and very useless. And then again, a man may be unlearned and very useful.

The point is this: Great piles of knowledge in the head are not the same as mental activity. A man may be very learned and very useless. And then again, a man may be unlearned and very useful.

The object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking.

And it often happens that a man can think better if he is not hampered by the knowledge of the past.

Else where would be the need for union officers? Every strike is a new argument for them; they point to it and say, "You see! You still need us."

The only true labour leader is the one who leads labour to work and to wages, and not the leader who leads labour to strikes, sabotage, and starvation.

The union of labour which is coming to the fore in this country is the union of all whose interests are interdependent—whose interests are altogether dependent on the usefulness and efficiency of the service they render.

And the country that stands most securely is the country in which men work honestly and do not play tricks with the means of production.

We cannot play fast and loose with economic laws, because if we do they handle us in very hard ways.

The fact that a piece of work is now being done by nine men which used to be done by ten men does not mean that the tenth man is unemployed.

It is sometimes said that the less a worker does, the more jobs he creates for other men. This fallacy assumes that idleness is creative.

Idleness never created a job. It creates only burdens.

The industrious man never runs his fellow worker out of a job; indeed, it is the industrious man who is the partner of the industrious manager—who creates more and more business and therefore more and more jobs.

The public was paying, and business was booming, and management didn't care a pin. It was no different in the office from what it was in the shop. The law of equivalents was broken just as much by managers as by workmen.

Practically nothing of importance is secured by mere demand.

That is why strikes always fail—even though they may seem to succeed. A strike which brings higher wages or shorter hours and passes on the burden to the community is really unsuccessful.

We do not believe in the "glad hand," or the professionalized "personal touch," or "human element." It is too late in the day for that sort of thing. Men want something more than a worthy sentiment.

Social conditions are not made out of words. They are the net result of the daily relations between man and man.

The best social spirit is evidenced by some act which costs the management something and which benefits all. That is the only way to prove good intentions and win respect. Propaganda, bulletins, lectures—they are nothing. It is the right act sincerely done that counts.

The best social spirit is evidenced by some act which costs the management something and which benefits all. That is the only way to prove good intentions and win respect. Propaganda, bulletins, lectures—they are nothing.

It is the right act sincerely done that counts.

A great business is really too big to be human. It grows so large as to supplant the personality of the man. In a big business the employer, like the employee, is lost in the mass.

The organization is secondary to the object. The only harmonious organization that is worth anything is an organization in which all the members are bent on the one main purpose—to get along toward the objective.

A common purpose, honestly believed in, sincerely desired—that is the great harmonizing principle.

I pity the poor fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always have "an atmosphere of good feeling" around him before he can do his work. There are such men.

The only harmonious organization that is worth anything is an organization in which all the members are bent on the one main purpose—to get along toward the objective. A common purpose, honestly believed in, sincerely desired—that is the great harmonizing principle.

I pity the poor fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always have "an atmosphere of good feeling" around him before he can do his work.

There are such men. And in the end, unless they obtain enough mental and moral hardiness to lift them out of their soft reliance on "feeling," they are failures. Not only are they business failures; they are character failures also;

Do not misunderstand me; when I use the term "good feeling" I mean that habit of making one's personal likes and dislikes the sole standard of judgment.

Suppose you do not like a man. Is that anything against him? It may be something against you.

What have your likes or dislikes to do with the facts? Every man of common sense knows that there are men whom he dislikes, who are really more capable than he is himself.

The public point of view is changing, and we really need only a somewhat different point of view to make the very bad system of the past into a very good system of the future.

We are displacing that peculiar virtue which used to be admired as hard-headedness, and which was really only wooden-headedness, with intelligence, and also we are getting rid of mushy sentimentalism.

The first confused hardness with progress; the second confused softness with progress.

We think less of the frills of civilization as we grow used to them. Progress, as the world has thus far known it, is accompanied by a great increase in the things of life.

There is more gear, more wrought material, in the average American backyard than in the whole domain of an African king.

The average American boy has more paraphernalia around him than a whole Eskimo community. The utensils of kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and coal cellar make a list that would have staggered the most luxurious potentate of five hundred years ago.

A human being is a human being and is nourished by the same amount and quality of food, is warmed by the same weight of clothing, whether he be rich or poor.

And no one can inhabit more than one room at a time.

But if one has visions of service, if one has vast plans which no ordinary resources could possibly realize, if one has a life ambition to make the industrial desert bloom like the rose, and the work-a-day life suddenly blossom into fresh and enthusiastic human …

… fresh and enthusiastic human motives of higher character and efficiency, then one sees in large sums of money what the farmer sees in his seed corn—the beginning of new and richer harvests whose benefits can no more be selfishly confined than can the sun's rays.

There are two fools in this world. One is the millionaire who thinks that by hoarding money he can somehow accumulate real power, and the other is the penniless reformer who thinks that if only he can take the money from one class and give it to another, all the world's ills will be cured.

They are both on the wrong track. They might as well try to corner all the checkers or all the dominoes of the world under the delusion that they are thereby cornering great quantities of skill.

Some of the most successful money-makers of our times have never added one pennyworth to the wealth of men.

Does a card player add to the wealth of the world?

If we all created wealth up to the limits, the easy limits, of our creative capacity, then it would simply be a case of there being enough for everybody, and everybody getting enough.

The business of life is easy or hard according to the skill or the lack of skill displayed in production and distribution. It has been thought that business existed for profit. That is wrong.

Business exists for service.

It is a profession, and must have recognized professional ethics, to violate which declasses a man. Business needs more of the professional spirit. The professional spirit seeks professional integrity, from pride, not from compulsion. The professional spirit detects its own violations and penalizes them.

Business needs more of the professional spirit. The professional spirit seeks professional integrity, from pride, not from compulsion. The professional spirit detects its own violations and penalizes them. Business will some day become clean.

A machine that stops every little while is an imperfect machine, and its imperfection is within itself.

A body that falls sick every little while is a diseased body, and its disease is within itself. So with business. Its faults, many of them purely the faults of the moral constitution of business, clog its progress and make it sick every little while.

Often it has come to me that what is regarded as the somewhat remarkable progression of our enterprises—

I will not say "success," for that word is an epitaph, and we are just starting

—is due to some accident;

There was nothing that could be called "favorable" about our beginning. We began with almost nothing. What we have, we earned, and we earned it by unremitting labour and faith in a principle.

We took what was a luxury and turned it into a necessity and without trick or subterfuge.

When we began to make our present motor car the country had few good roads, gasoline was scarce, and the idea was firmly implanted in the public mind that an automobile was at the best a rich man's toy.

I want to prove it so that all of us may have more, and that all of us may live better by increasing the service rendered by all businesses.

Poverty cannot be abolished by formula; it can be abolished only by hard and intelligent work.

We are, in effect, an experimental station to prove a principle. That we do make money is only further proof that we are right. For that is a species of argument that establishes itself without words.

No, destructive competition benefits no one. The kind of competition which results in the defeat of the many and the overlordship of the ruthless few must go. Destructive competition lacks the qualities out of which progress comes.

Progress comes from a generous form of rivalry.

Bad competition is personal. It works for the aggrandizement of some individual or group. It is a sort of warfare. It is inspired by a desire to "get" someone. It is wholly selfish.