Charles Kettering Inventor Quotations

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.