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If I want to stop a research program I can always do it by getting a few experts to sit in on the subject, because they know right away that it was a fool thing to try in the first place.

Charles Kettering

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Charles Kettering
Age: 82 †
Born: 1876
Born: August 29
Died: 1958
Died: November 25
Engineer
Entrepreneur
Inventor
Derby
Vermont
Charles Franklin Kettering
Trying
Getting
Always
Science
Experts
Away
Subject
Place
Program
Firsts
Research
First
Subjects
Right
Fool
Thing
Stop

More quotes by Charles Kettering

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If I have had any success, it's due to luck, but I notice the harder I work, the luckier I get.
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Action without intelligence is a form of insanity, but intelligence without action is the greatest form of stupidity in the world.
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here is a great difference between knowing a thing and understanding it. You can know a lot and not really understand anything.
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One fails forward toward success.
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What I believe is that, by proper effort, we make the future almost anything we want to make it.
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Obsolescence is a factor which says that the new thing I bring you is worth more than the unused value of the old thing.
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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.
Charles Kettering
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I think that the greatest education in the world is the education which helps one to be able to do the right things at the time it has to be done.
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I am not interested in the past. I am interested in the future, for that is where I expect to spend the rest of my life.
Charles Kettering
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The price of progress is trouble.
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I could do nothing without my problems they toughen my mind. In fact, I tell my assistants not to bring me their successes for they weaken me, but rather to bring me their problems, for they strengthen me.
Charles Kettering
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One of the things we have to be thankful for is that we don't get as much government as we pay for.
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Industry prospers when it offers people articles which they want more than they want anything they now have. The fact is that people never buy what they need. They buy what they want.
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The simplest way to assure sales is to keep changing the product the market for new things is indefinitely elastic. One of the fundamental purposes of advertising, styling, and research is to foster a healthy dissatisfaction.
Charles Kettering
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Every honest researcher I know admits he's just a professional amateur. He's doing whatever he's doing for the first time. That makes him an amateur. He has sense enough to know that he's going to have a lot of trouble, so that makes him a professional.
Charles Kettering
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I don't want men of experience working for me. The experienced man is always telling me why something can't be done. The fellow who has not had any experience is so dumb he doesn't know a thing can't be done - and he goes ahead and does it.
Charles Kettering
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We have a lot of people revolutionizing the world because they've never had to present a working model.
Charles Kettering
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You are always too late with a development if you are so slow that people demand it before you yourself recognize it. The research department should have foreseen what was necessary and had it ready to a point where people never knew they wanted it until it was made available to them.
Charles Kettering
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People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.
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Logic is a system whereby one may go wrong with confidence.
Charles Kettering