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Great Steps In Human Progress Are Made By Things That Don't Work The Way Philosophy Thought They Should. If Things Always Worked The Way They Should, You Could Write The History Of The World From Now On. But They Don't, And It Is Those Deviations From The Normal That Make Human Progress.

-Charles Kettering

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Great Steps In Human

Charles Kettering

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Great Steps In Human Progress Are Made By Things That Don't Work The Way Philosophy Thought They Should. If Things Always Worked The Way They Should, You Could Write The History Of The World From Now On. But They Don't, And It Is Those Deviations From The Normal That Make Human Progress.

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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.

If We Taught Music The Way We Try To Teach Engineering, In An Unbroken Four Year Course, We Could End Up With All Theory And No Music. When We Study Music, We Start To Practice From The Beginning, And We Practice For The Entire Time.

The Difference Between Intelligence And An Education Is This: That Intelligence Will Make A Good Living For You, But Education Won't Do Much For You At All.

A Man Must Have A Certain Amount Of Intelligent Ignorance To Get Anywhere.

People See The Wrongness In An Idea Much Quicker That The Rightness.

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.

An Inventor Fails 999 Times, And If He Succeeds Once, He's In. He Treats His Failures Simply As Practice Shots.

The Only Time You Mustn't Fail Is The Last Time You Try.

It Is Not A Disgrace To Fail. Failing Is One Of The Greatest Arts In The World.

Don't Bring Anything To Me But Trouble.

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 Someone Reaching For His Slide Rule. Then He'd Be On His Feet Saying, "boss, You Can't Do It."

A Research Problem Is Not Solved By Apparatus; It Is Solved In A Man's Head.

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.

This Problem, Too, Will Look Simple After It Is Solved.

We Have A Lot Of People Revolutionizing The World Because They've Never Had To Present A Working Model.

A Problem Well Stated Is A Problem Half-solved.

You Must Take The Problem As It Is, And Let It Be What It Wants To Be.

Every Father Should Remember One Day His Son Will Follow His Example, Not His Advice.

No One Would Have Crossed The Ocean If He Could Have Gotten Off The Ship In The Storm.

Inventing Is A Combination Of Brains And Materials. The More Brains You Use, The Less Material You Need.

The World Hates Change, Yet It Is The Only Thing That Has Brought Progress.

I Expect To Spend The Rest Of My Life In The Future, So I Want To Be Reasonably Sure Of What Kind Of Future It's Going To Be. That Is My Reason For Planning.

You Can Send A Message Around The World In One-fifth Of A Second, Yet It May Take Years For It To Get From The Outside Of A Man's Head To The Inside.

Our Imagination Is The Only Limit To What We Can Hope To Have In The Future.

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.

High Achievement Always Takes Place In The Framework Of High Expectation.

You Can't Have A Better Tomorrow If You Are Thinking About Yesterday All The Time.

If I Have Had Any Success, It's Due To Luck, But I Notice The Harder I Work, The Luckier I Get.

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.

The Key To Economic Prosperity Is The Organized Creation Of Dissatisfaction.

There Has Never Been Any 30-hour Week For Men Who Had Anything To Do.

The Opportunities Of Man Are Limited Only By His Imagination. But So Few Have Imagination That There Are Ten Thousand Fiddlers To One Composer.

And There Is The Point Exactly, We Are All The Time Blaming Difficulties On To Something Else. Our Real Trouble Is That We Are Too Soft To Solve The Problem.

Failures, Repeated Failures, Are Sign-posts On The Road To Achievement. The Only Time You Don't Want To Fail Is The Last Time You Try Something (and It Works).

If You're Doing Something The Same Way You Have Been Doing It For Ten Years, The Chances Are You Are Doing It Wrong.

We Have Reason Not To Be Afraid Of The Machine, For There Is Always Constructive Change, The Enemy Of Machines, Making Them Change To Fit New Conditions.

Every Great Improvement Has Come After Repeated Failures. Virtually Nothing Comes Out Right The First Time. Failures, Repeated Failures, Are Finger Posts On The Road To Achievement. One Fails Forward Toward Success.

It Is Easy To Build A Philosophy - It Doesn't Have To Run

Research Is An Organized Method Of Trying To Find Out What You Are Going To Do After You Cannot Do What You Are Doing Now. It May Also Be Said To Be The Method Of Keeping A Customer Reasonably Dissatisfied With What He Has. That Means Constant Improvement And Change So That The Customer Will Be Stimulated To Desire The New Product Enough To Buy It To Replace The One He Has.

Bankers Regard Research As Most Dangerous A Thing That Makes Banking Hazardous Due To The Rapid Changes It Brings About In Industry.

In America We Can Say What We Think, And Even If We Can't Think, We Can Say It Anyhow.

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.

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.

I Often Say That Research Is A Way Of Finding Out What You Are Going To Do When You Can't Keep On Doing What You Are Doing Now.

Research Means That You Don't Know, But Are Willing To Find Out.

Thinking Is One Thing No One Has Ever Been Able To Tax.

An Inventor Is Simply A Fellow Who Doesn't Take His Education Too Seriously.

If You Want To Kill Any Idea In The World, Get A Committee Working On It.

The Price Of Progress Is Trouble.

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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.

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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.

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.

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The Wright Brothers Flew Right Through The Smoke Screen Of Impossibility.

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All Human Development, No Matter What Form It Takes, Must Be Outside The Rules; Otherwise We Would Never Have Anything New.

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.

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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.

Whenever You Look At A Piece Of Work And You Think The Fellow Was Crazy, Then You Want To Pay Some Attention To That. One Of You Is Likely To Be, And You Had Better Find Out Which One It Is. It Makes An Awful Lot Of Difference.

If A Fellow Wants To Be Nobody In The Business World, Let Him Neglect Sending The Mailman To Somebody On His Behalf.

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Learn How To Fail Intelligently.

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Believe And Act As If It Were Impossible To Fail.

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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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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.

We Need To Teach The Highly Educated Man That It Is Not A Disgrace To Fail And That He Must Analyze Every Failure To Find Its Cause. He Must Learn How To Fail Intelligently, For Failing Is One Of The Greatest Arts In The World.

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One Fails Forward Toward Success.

99 Percent Of Success Is Built On Failure.

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It Doesn't Matter If You Try And Try And Try Again, And Fail. It Does Matter If You Try And Fail, And Fail To Try Again.

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Research Is An Organized Method For Keeping You Reasonably Dissatisfied With What You Have.

The Whole Fun Of Living Is Trying To Make Something Better.

Something Better

I've Never Heard Of Anyone Stumbling On Something Sitting Down.

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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