Henry Ford Quotes

94 Sourced Quotes

Of course, it is not the employer who pays wages. He only handles the money. It is the product that pays wages and it is the management that arranges the production so that the product may pay the wages.

Henry Ford
A man's real education begins after he has left school. True education is gained through the discipline of life.

Henry Ford
No government can guarantee security. It can only tax production, distribution and service and gradually crush the power to pay taxes. That settles nothing. It only uses up the gains of the past and postpones the developments of the future.

Henry Ford
When you get a whole country - as did ours - thinking that Washington is a sort of heaven and behind its clouds dwell omniscience and omnipotence, you are educating that country into a dependent state of mind which augers ill for the future.

Henry Ford
The function of the machine is to liberate man from brute burdens, and release his energies to the building of his intellectual and spiritual powers for conquests in the fields of thought and higher action.

Henry Ford
Money is worth what it will help you to produce or buy and no more.

Henry Ford
We're going to try to get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas.

Henry Ford
The average man won't really do a day's work unless he is caught and cannot get out of it. There is plenty of work to do if people would do it.

Henry Ford
Almost all enduring success comes to people after they are forty. For seldom does mature judgment arrive before then.

Henry Ford
Wealth is nothing more or less than a tool to do things with. It is like the fuel that runs the furnace or the belt that runs the wheel—only a means to an end.

Henry Ford
We want to get full value out of labour so that we may be able to pay it full value. It is use - not conservation - that interests us.

Henry Ford
If you think of standardization as the best that you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow; you get somewhere.

Henry Ford
An underpaid man is a customer reduced in purchasing power. He cannot buy. Business depression is caused by weakened purchasing power. Purchasing power is weakened by uncertainty or insufficiency of income. The cure of business depression is through purchasing power, and the source of purchasing power is wages.

Henry Ford
I am not a reformer. 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.

Henry Ford
I found that competition was supposed to be a menace and that a good manager circumvented his competitors by getting a monopoly by artificial means.

Henry Ford
Let them fail; let everybody fail! I made my fortune when I had nothing to start with, by myself and my own ideas. Let other people do the same thing. If I lose everything in the collapse of our financial structure, I will start in at the beginning and build it up again.

Henry Ford
We have never considered any costs as fixed. Therefore we first reduce the price to a point where we believe more sales will result. Then we go ahead and try to make the price. We do not bother about the costs. The new price forces the cost down.

Henry Ford
There are always two kinds of people in the world - those who pioneer and those who plod. The plodders always attack the pioneers. They say that the pioneers have gobbled up all the opportunity, when, as a plain matter of fact, the plodders would have nowhere to plod had not the pioneers first cleared the way.

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

Henry Ford
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. A business that misuses what it has will continue to misuse what it can get.

Henry Ford