Henry Ford Quotes (1863-1947)

“I believe we are reincarnated. You, I, we reincarnate over and over. We live many lives, and store up much experience. Some are older souls than others and so they know more. It seems to be an intuitive "gift." It is really hard-won experience.”

“The work is always there, but what men wait for is employment. It is not their fault; they have been taught for ages that it is employment and not work that counts. An employer is usually a man who has tackled the work; an employee is usually a man who is satisfied with the security of a job on another man’s work.”

“You can hardly have too much harmony in business. But you can go too far in picking men because they harmonize.”

“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's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for one hundred years.”

“There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for one hundred years.”

“The people must be helped to think naturally about money. They must be told what it is, and what makes it money, and what are the possible tricks of the present system which put nations and peoples under control of the few.”

“He felt there was a central processing core of life that went on and on. That was his conclusion. We talked of it many times together . . . Call it religion or what you like, Mr. Edison believed that the universe was alive and that it was responsive to man's deep necessity. It was an intelligent and hopeful religion if there ever was one. Mr. Edison went away expecting light, not darkness.”

“Industrialist Henry Ford hated jazz. He thought it was a Jewish conspiracy to use black music to get good white people into booze, cigarettes and sex.”

“Only workers are forbidden to be internationalists. It’s perfectly proper for J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford; for the bankers, the munitions trusts, the chemical companies. It’s proper for scientists, stamp collectors, athletic associations, musicians, spiritualists, people who raise bees, to be internationalist – but not workers. Only the clasped hands of the workers across the boundaries are struck down in every country.”

“we feel that we don't want abstract equality rights, we want material equality. That means the redistribution of the wealth in this society. And that means that people like Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Ford or the Bishop Estate or Dillingham or whatever, they have to redistribute the wealth that they have robbed from the poor working people of the world. I mean, they made if off our backs. Henry Ford, he made the first Model T. After that, who made all the other cars. So it wasn't him, it was the people who work in the automobile factories, who sweat in 100 degree temperatures; who risk industrial accidents for a lousy $150 a week. And he makes millions every year. And he ain't produced shit. I mean, he just sits behind his desk and writes papers, either that or signs checks. That's the reality of the way society functions. And what we say, we do want a redistribution of that wealth-spread it among the people it's been robbed from. Return it to the people it belongs to.”

“The model for us rich guys should be Henry Ford. When Ford famously introduced the $5 day, which was twice the prevailing wage at the time, he didn't just increase the productivity of his factories, he converted exploited autoworkers who were poor into a thriving middle class who could now afford to buy the products that they made. Ford intuited what we now know is true, that an economy is best understood as an ecosystem and characterized by the same kinds of feedback loops you find in a natural ecosystem, a feedback loop between customers and businesses. Raising wages increases demand, which increases hiring, which in turn increases wages and demand and profits, and that virtuous cycle of increasing prosperity is precisely what is missing from today's economic...”

“In 1932 Dearborn police had fired into a crowd of 4,000 seeking entrance to the Ford plant to protest against mass lay-offs, and had killed four men and wounded many others. Ever since Henry Ford announced a $5-a-day minimum wage for unskilled labor in 1913, the automobile industry had had the reputation of paying "fat" wages. But the auto workers received less than an average of $1,300 a year in 1925, when times were good, and less than $1,000 in 1935. A report to the NRA (by the Henderson committee) showed that 45 per cent of these workers were paid less than $1,000 in 1934. In one plant three-fifths of the employees received less than $800, while a third got less than $400. UAW aggressiveness in 1936 evidently was felt by the car manufacturers. With the exception of Henry Ford, always an independent, they acted in concert in most matters affecting the industry.”

“Every year Jews make more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions; only a single great man, Ford, to their fury still maintains full independence.”

“"Progress" is for the convinced ochlocrats a consoling Utopia of madly increased comfort and technicism. This charming but dull vision was always the pseudoreligious consolation of millions of ecstatic believers in ochlocracy and in the relative perfection and wisdom of Mr. and Mrs. Averageman. Utopias in general are surrogates for heaven; they give a meager solace to the individual that his sufferings and endeavors may enable future generations to enter the chiliastic paradise. Communism works in a similar way. Its millennium is almost the same as that of ochlocracy. The Millennium of Lenin, the Millennium of Bellamy, the Millennium as represented in H. G. Wells's, [The Shape] Of Things to Come, the Millennium of Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford — they are all basically the same; they often differ in their means to attain it but they all agree in the point of technical perfection and the classless or at least totally homogeneous society without grudge or envy.”

“It will take a hundred years to tell whether he helped us or hurt us, but he certainly didn't leave us where he found us.”