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.
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.
A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feet in it.
Every experience is worth having.
A man ought to be able to live on a scale commensurate with the service that he renders.
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.
A business which can bring itself to the point where it attracts the attention of money should be able to continue on its own feet without being financed.
Every man is better for a period of work under the open sky.
Political parties are like poets, born, not made.
In my mind nothing is more abhorrent than a life of ease. None of us has any right to ease. There is no place in civilization for the idler.
Labour is the human element which makes the fruitful seasons of the earth useful to men.
For most purposes, a man with a machine is better than a man without a machine.
Mediocrity is the worst enemy of prosperity.
A man given to pride is usually proud of the wrong thing.
Under pressure, the mouth speaks when the brain is disengaged, and, sometimes unwittingly, the gearshift is in reverse when it should be in neutral.
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.
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.
Understand the difference between being at work and working.
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.
There is safety in small beginnings and there is unlimited capital in the experience gained by growing.