Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was an American industrialist and business magnate. He was the founder of Ford Motor Company and chief developer of the assembly line technique of mass production. Ford was the first to manufacture an automobile that was affordable for middle-class Americans. His conversion of the automobile from an expensive luxury into an accessible conveyance profoundly affected many aspects of life in the 20th century.
Henry Ford, born on a Michigan farm, founded Ford Motor Company in 1903, introducing the groundbreaking Model T in 1908 and pioneering “Fordism” with mass production and high worker wages. A pacifist initially, Ford’s company later supplied weapons during World War I. In the 1920s, he promoted antisemitism through media outlets. Despite opposing U.S. entry into World War II, his company contributed to the war effort. Ford’s son’s death in 1943 led to his return to company control, eventually passing it to his grandson in 1945. He died in 1947, leaving his wealth to the Ford Foundation.
Henry Ford Quotes
1. “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.”
— Henry Ford
2. “Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is a success.”
— Henry Ford
3. “Failure is simply an opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
— Henry Ford
4. “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.”
— Henry Ford
5. “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.”
— Henry Ford
6. “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
— Henry Ford
7. “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.”
— Henry Ford
8. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
— Henry Ford
9. “Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals.”
— Henry Ford
10. “Thinking is the hardest thing a man can do, probably the reason so few of them do it.”
— Henry Ford
11. “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.”
— Henry Ford
12. “Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice.”
— Henry Ford
13. “You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”
— Henry Ford
14. “It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.”
— Henry Ford
15. “Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.”
— Henry Ford
16. “There is no man living who isn’t capable of doing more than he thinks he can do.”
— Henry Ford
17. “Believe in the best. Have a goal for the best, never be satisfied with less than your best, try your best, and in the long run things will turn out for the best.”
— Henry Ford
18. “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”
— Henry Ford
19. “One of the greatest discoveries a person makes, one of their great surprises, is to find they can do what they were afraid they couldn’t do.”
— Henry Ford
20. “If money is your hope for independence, you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.”
— Henry Ford
21. “Genius is seldom recognized for what it is: a great capacity for hard work.”
— Henry Ford
22. “Vision without execution is just hallucination.”
— Henry Ford
23. “The man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he can’t are both right. Which one are you?”
— Henry Ford
24. “Don’t find fault, find a remedy.”
— Henry Ford
25. “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.”
— Henry Ford
26. “My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.”
— Henry Ford
27. “Life is a series of experiences, each of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward.”
— Henry Ford
28. “Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.”
— Henry Ford
29. “To see a thing clearly in the mind makes it begin to take form.”
— Henry Ford
30. “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”
— Henry Ford
31. “You say I started out with practically nothing, but that isn’t correct. We all start with all there is, it’s how we use it that makes things possible.”
— Henry Ford
32. “Working together is success.”
— Henry Ford
33. “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”
— Henry Ford
34. “Those who walk with God, always reach their destination.”
— Henry Ford
35. “With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end.”
— Henry Ford
36. “It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.”
— Henry Ford
37. “If it doesn’t add value, it’s waste.”
— Henry Ford
38. “You can do anything if you have enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes rise to the stars.”
— Henry Ford
39. “Those who never make mistakes work for those of us who do.”
— Henry Ford
40. “You can take my factories, burn up my buildings, but give me my people and I’ll build the business right back again.”
— Henry Ford
41. “A poor man is not the one without a cent. A poor man is the one without a dream.”
— Henry Ford
42. “Luck and destiny are the excuses of the world’s failures.”
— Henry Ford
43. “There are no dead ends. There is always a way out. What you learn in one failure you utilize in your next success.”
— Henry Ford
44. “Mediocrity is the worst enemy of prosperity.”
— Henry Ford
45. “You are the Master of your Fate, the Captain of your Soul.”
— Henry Ford
46. “Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.”
— Henry Ford
47. “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.”
— Henry Ford
48. “One who fears failure limits his activities.”
— Henry Ford
49. “Those who stop marketing to save money are like those who stop a clock to save time.”
— Henry Ford
50. “There are no big problems, there are just a lot of little problems.”
— Henry Ford
51. “Be ready to revise any system, scrap any method, abandon any theory, if the success of the job requires it.”
— Henry Ford
52. “Two percent of the people think; three percent think they think, and 95 percent would rather die than think.”
— Henry Ford
53. “The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.”
— Henry Ford
54. “Show me who makes a profit from war, and I’ll show you how to stop the war.”
— Henry Ford
55. “I’ll sleep well tonight.”
— Henry Ford
56. “Whatever your goal in life, the beginning is knowledge and experience.”
— Henry Ford
57. “Old men are always advising young men to save money. That is bad advice. Don’t save every nickel. Invest in yourself. I never saved a dollar until I was forty years old.”
— Henry Ford
58. “Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage. The easiest of all wastes and the hardest to correct is the waste of time, because wasted time does not litter the floor like wasted material.”
— Henry Ford
59. “Businesses that grow by development and improvement do not die.”
— Henry Ford
60. “The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.”
— Henry Ford
61. “Anybody can do anything that he imagines.”
— Henry Ford
62. “Improved productivity means less human sweat, not more.”
— Henry Ford
63. “An educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few dates in history – he is one who can accomplish things.”
— Henry Ford
64. “Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars. Enthusiasm is the sparkle in your eyes, the swing in your gait. The grip of your hand, the irresistible surge of will and energy to execute your ideas.”
— Henry Ford
65. “The object of living is work, experience, happiness.”
— Henry Ford
66. “Patience and foresight are the two most important qualities in business.”
— Henry Ford
67. “Businesses that grow by development and improvement do not die. But when a business ceases to be creative, when it believes it has reached perfection and needs to do nothing but produce no improvement, no development, it is done.”
— Henry Ford
68. “I invented nothing new, I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom there was centuries of work.”
— Henry Ford
69. “A man who cannot think is not an educated man however many college degrees he may have acquired.”
— Henry Ford
70. “Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this.”
— Henry Ford
71. “When I see an Alfa Romeo go by, I tip my hat.”
— Henry Ford
72. “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
73. “I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.”
— Henry Ford
74. “Man minus the Machine is a slave; Man plus the Machine is a freeman.”
— Henry Ford
75. “Gold is the most useless thing in the world. I am not interested in money but in the things of which money is merely a symbol.”
— Henry Ford
76. “To be good is not enough; a man must be good for something.”
— Henry Ford
77. “Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the government take care of him better take a closer look at the American Indian.”
— Henry Ford
78. “The human mind is a channel through which things-to-be are coming into the realm of things-that-are .”
— Henry Ford
79. “Paying good wages is not charity at all-it is the best kind of business.”
— Henry Ford
80. “Under pressure, the mouth speaks when the brain is disengaged, and, sometimes unwittingly, the gearshift is in reverse when it should be in neutral.”
— Henry Ford
81. “The short successes that can be gained in a brief time and without difficulty, are not worth much.”
— Henry Ford
82. “Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage.”
— Henry Ford
83. “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.”
— Henry Ford
84. “The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debts.”
— Henry Ford
85. “Every success is the mother of countless others.”
— Henry Ford
86. “Enthusiasm is the sparkle in your eyes, the swing in your gait.”
— Henry Ford
87. “I was happier when I was doing a mechanic’s job.”
— Henry Ford
88. “One needs to be successful in the conventional way to learn just how far away from success it may be.”
— Henry Ford
89. “Individualism is what makes cooperation worth living.”
— Henry Ford
90. “If someone betrays you once, it is his fault. If he betrays you twice, it is your fault. Blessed are those who can laugh at themselves, they will never cease to be amused. Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals.”
— Henry Ford
91. “The Government is a servant and never should be anything but a servant. 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.”
— Henry Ford
92. “Any colour – so long as it’s black.”
— Henry Ford
93. “A business which exists to make one man or one family rich, and whose existence is of no moment when this is achieved, is not solidly founded.”
— Henry Ford
94. “Impossible means that you haven’t found a solution yet .”
— Henry Ford
95. “Labor unions are the worst thing that ever struck the earth because they take away a man’s independence.”
— Henry Ford
96. “What’s right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity – intellect and resources – to do some thing about them.”
— Henry Ford
97. “If there is unemployment in America, it is because the unemployed do not want to work.”
— Henry Ford
98. “I will build a car for the great multitude.”
— Henry Ford
99. “If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”
— Henry Ford
100. “To me this is the most beautiful, the most satisfactory from a scientific standpoint, the most logical theory of life. For thirty years I have leaned toward the theory of Reincarnation. It seems a most reasonable philosophy and explains many things.”
— Henry Ford
101. “Labour is the human element which makes the fruitful seasons of the earth useful to men.”
— Henry Ford
102. “A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.”
— Henry Ford
103. “Anyone who keeps learning stays young.”
— Henry Ford
104. “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.”
— Henry Ford
105. “We do not make changes for the sake of making them, but we never fail to make a change when once it is demonstrated that the new way is better than the old way.”
— Henry Ford
106. “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
— Henry Ford
107. “Those who believe they can do something and those who believe they can’t are both right.”
— Henry Ford
108. “There should be no unemployment. There is a large percentage of labor now which cannot make a living because wages are not high enough. That is industry’s 2nd job. 1st job is to make good product. 2nd pay a good wage.”
— Henry Ford
109. “To do more for the world than the world does for you – that is success.”
— Henry Ford
110. “Our country is still young and its potential is still enormous. We should remember, as we look toward the future, that the more fully we believe in and achieve freedom and equal opportunity – not simply for ourselves but for others – the greater our accomplishments as a nation will be.”
— Henry Ford
111. “The two most important things in any company do not appear in its balance sheet: its reputation and its people.”
— Henry Ford
112. “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.”
— Henry Ford
113. “Every object tells a story if you know how to read it.”
— Henry Ford
114. “If you think of standardization as the best that you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow; you get somewhere.”
— Henry Ford
115. “Failure is the chance to do it better next time.”
— Henry Ford
116. “One who fears failure limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again.”
— Henry Ford
117. “Every piece of work in the shops moves. Save 10 steps a day for each of the 12,000 employees, and you will have saved 50 miles of wasted motion and misspent energy.”
— Henry Ford
118. “Greatest thing in life is experience. Even mistakes have value.”
— Henry Ford
119. “You don’t have to hold a position to be a leader.”
— Henry Ford
120. “Money doesn’t change men, it merely unmasks them. If a man is naturally selfish or arrogant or greedy, the money brings that out, that’s all.”
— Henry Ford
121. “It is always possible to do a thing better the second time.”
— Henry Ford
122. “Paying attention to simple little things that most men neglect makes a few men rich.”
— Henry Ford
123. “Why use up the forests which were centuries in the making and the mines which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of the hemp fields?”
— Henry Ford
124. “Education is preeminently a matter of quality, not amount.”
— Henry Ford
125. “The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.”
— Henry Ford
126. “The most important history is the history we make today.”
— Henry Ford
127. “There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail.”
— Henry Ford
128. “We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.”
— Henry Ford
129. “Do your best every time because by doing a thing well you build something valuable into yourself.”
— Henry Ford
130. “There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.”
— Henry Ford
131. “Every time you try to quit smoking you are actually getting closer to staying smoke-free.”
— Henry Ford
132. “There are three things that grow more precious with age; old wood to burn, old books to read, and old friends to enjoy.”
— Henry Ford
133. “Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service.”
— Henry Ford
134. “Business must be run at a profit, else it will die. But when anyone tries to run a business solely for profit, then also the business must die, for it no longer has a reason for existence.”
— Henry Ford
135. “Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product.”
— Henry Ford
136. “There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.”
— Henry Ford
137. “The only statement I care to make about the Protocols is that they fit in with what is going on.”
— Henry Ford
138. “The farther you look back, the farther you can look ahead.”
— Henry Ford
139. “The gifted man bears his gifts into the world, not for his own benefit, but for the people among whom he is placed; for the gifts are not his, he himself is a gift to the community.”
— Henry Ford
140. “The true measure of a successful leader is their ability to discover the hidden talent in those they lead and challenge them to achieve greatness. If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you are right.”
— Henry Ford
141. “There is no failure except failure to serve one’s purpose.”
— Henry Ford
142. “The secret of success is to understand the viewpoint of others.”
— Henry Ford
143. “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.”
— Henry Ford
144. “You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.”
— Henry Ford
145. “I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about.”
— Henry Ford
146. “Businessmen go down with their businesses because they like the old way so well they cannot bring themselves to change. One sees them all about – men who do not know that yesterday is past, and who woke up this morning with their last year’s ideas.”
— Henry Ford
147. “Too many men are afraid of being fools.”
— Henry Ford
148. “You can do anything if you have enthusiasm.”
— Henry Ford
149. “If I’d listened to customers, I’d have given them a faster horse.”
— Henry Ford
150. “If people understood how the economic system works, there’d be a revolution in a minute.”
— Henry Ford
151. “I believe we are reincarnated. You, I, we reincarnate over and over. We live many lives and store up much experience. Some are older souls than others and so they know more. It seems to be an intuitive “gift.” It is really hard-won experience.”
— Henry Ford
152. “Many people are busy trying to find better ways of doing things that should not have to be done at all. There is no progress in merely finding a better way to do a useless thing.”
— Henry Ford
153. “The best way is always the simplest. The attics of the world are cluttered up with complicated failures.”
— Henry Ford
154. “Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.”
— Henry Ford
155. “America is not a land of money but of wealth a land of rich people, but of successful workers.”
— Henry Ford
156. “I invented nothing new. I simply combined the inventions of others into a car. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed.”
— Henry Ford
157. “The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.”
— Henry Ford
158. “Thinking without constructive action becomes a disease.”
— Henry Ford
159. “There is joy in work.”
— Henry Ford
160. “The hardest thing in the world to do is to think, and that is why people do so little of it.”
— Henry Ford
161. “Nobody can think straight who does not work. Idleness warps the mind.”
— Henry Ford
162. “The way to learn to do things is to do things. The way to learn a trade is to work at it. Success teaches how to succeed. Begin with the determination to succeed, and the work is half done already.”
— Henry Ford
163. “A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.”
— Henry Ford
164. “Profit is a by-product of work; happiness is its chief product.”
— Henry Ford
165. “A customer votes every day with his dollar. Our job is to make sure he votes for us.”
— Henry Ford
166. “People are as happy as they choose to be.”
— Henry Ford
167. “It is the customer that pays the wages.”
— Henry Ford
168. “The Jews caused the war, the Jews caused the outbreak of thieving and robbery all over the country, the Jews caused the inefficiency of the navy.”
— Henry Ford
169. “Mark my word: A combination airplane and motor car is coming…”
— Henry Ford
170. “One of the most difficult things to do in life is thinking; that’s why so few people engage in it.”
— Henry Ford
171. “It is failure that is easy. Success is always hard.”
— Henry Ford
172. “If you don’t think of the future, you won’t have one.”
— Henry Ford
173. “Do you want to know the cause of war? It is capitalism, greed, the dirty hunger for dollars. Take away the capitalist and you will sweep war from the earth.”
— Henry Ford
174. “The more you think, the more time you have.”
— Henry Ford
175. “The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.”
— Henry Ford
