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Charles F. Kettering Quotes

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"One fails forward toward success."

"You can be sincere and still be stupid."

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

"The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility."

"My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid."

"High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation."
Business

"Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail."

"It is not a disgrace to fail. Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world."

"You can't have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time."

"The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress."
Change

"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."

"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."

"An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he's in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots."

"The only difference between a problem and a solution is that people understand the solution."

"Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it."

"People are very open-minded about new things - as long as they're exactly like the old ones."

"Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need."

"Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down."

"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 some engineer reaching for his slide rule. Then he'd be on his feet saying, "Boss you can't do that.""

"The future can be anything we want it to be, providing we have the faith and that we realize that peace, no less than war, required "blood and sweat and tears.""

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