Charles Kettering Inventor Quotations

My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.

Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.

An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously.

If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.

A person must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere.

We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.

An inventor is simply a person who doesn't take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates form college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. It he succeeds once then he's in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that 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.