Founder Quotes

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.

I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.

Success is a matter of adjusting one's efforts to obstacles and one's abilities to a service needed by others.

The Model T blazed the way for the motor industry & started the movement for good roads everywhere. It is still the pioneer car in many parts of the world which are just beginning to be motorized.

Some people don't like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.

People are as happy as they choose to be.

These men of many nations must be taught American ways, the English language, and the right way to live.

He who would really benefit mankind must reach them through their work.

Bankers play far too great a part in the conduct of industry.

Many people miss opportunity because it came disguised in overalls.

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.

For most purposes, a man with a machine is better than a man without a machine.

Opportunities will not overlook you because you are wearing overalls.

The short successes that can be gained in a brief time and without difficulty, are not worth much.

Money the root of all evil, unless used for good purpose

As you heat the planet up, it's just like boiling a pot.

Do your best every time because by doing a thing well you build something valuable into yourself

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.

Why should I clutter my mind with general information when I have men around me who can supply any knowledge I need?

Humans need to be a multiplanet species.

Borrowing for expansion is one thing; borrowing to make up for mismanagement and waste is quite another.

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.

If you're co-founder or CEO, you have to do all kinds of tasks you might not want to do. If you don't do your chores, the company won't succeed. No task is too menial.

Records can be destroyed if they do not suit the prejudices of ruling cliques, lost if they become incomprehensible, distorted if a copyist wishes to impose a new meaning upon them, misunderstood if we lack the information to interpret them. The past is like a huge library, mostly fiction.

I hate writing about personal stuff. I don't have a Facebook page. I don't use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don't use them.

Any colour - so long as it's black.

I say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens.

Money doesn't change men. It merely unmasks them.

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?

No unemployment insurance can be compared to an alliance between a man and a plot of land.

Every business is a monarchy with, not a man, but an idea as king.

If there is one thing I would banish from earth, it is fear. And the only way to do that is to see that there is nothing to fear - nothing in all of life to be afraid of.

And we need things in life that are exciting and inspiring. It can't just be about solving some awful problem. There have to be reasons to get up in the morning.

Too many men are afraid of being fools.

I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.

So we originally expected to make about 35 gigawatt hours at the cell level and about 50 gigawatt hours at the module or pack level. Now we are expecting to do about 150 gigawatt hours in the same volumetric space as the original design.

The tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but […] once you do that, the rest is really easy.

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.

When one speaks of increasing power, machinery, and industry there comes up a picture of a cold, metallic sort of world in which great factories will drive away the trees, the flowers, the birds, and the green fields. And that then we shall have a world composed of metal machines and human machines. With all of that I do not agree. I think that unless we know more about the machines and their use, unless we better understand the mechanical portion of life, we cannot have the time to enjoy the trees, and the birds, and the flowers, and the green fields.

The biggest mistake, in general, I've made, is to put too much of a weighting on someone's talent and not enough on their personality. And I've made that mistake several times. I think it actually matters whether somebody has a good heart, it really does. I've made the mistake of thinking that it's sometimes just about the brain.

The time will come when man will know even what is going on in the other planets and perhaps be able to visit them.

We have always found that, if the principles were right, the area over which they were affected did not matter. Size is only a matter of the multiplication table.

Genius is seldom recognized for what it is: a great capacity for hard work.

History is more or less bunk.

It's your thinking that decides whether you're going to succeed or fail.

The only true test of values, either of men or of things, is that of their ability to make the world a better place in which to live.

The more you think, the more time you have.

You can do anything if you have enthusiasm.

Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.

People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.

success is 99% failure

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.

There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years.

I don't think it's a good idea to plan to sell a company.

Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That's pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.

I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don't believe in the whole thing of just using other people's money. I don't think that's right. I'm not going to ask other people to invest in something if I'm not prepared to do so myself.

I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

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.

Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.