“ Ford not only believes, but he acts constantly upon who belief, that the Engineer of the Universe has placed each of the two billion or so human beings on this planet on the job of learning by experience the particular things each most needs to learn. If a man becomes a murderer, it is because he needed the experience. ”

“ As for Henry Ford himself, we are told, "he must do what he thinks best with his two-billion-dollar tool, not what somebody else thinks best; for in carrying out the orders of the Engineer of the Universe it is quite impossible to pass the buck." ”

“ If he lives in poverty and pain, that was the experience of which he stood most in need. After he gets his experiences, he dies. Then he is born again into another life which will give him other experiences of which he stands in need.
Eventually, through the eons, some souls thus learn a good deal which nobody knew a million years ago. That is, nobody but the Engineer of the Universe. Most of us, in fact, have already learned not to murder, except in war, and we may in time, learn not to make war. Only recently did anybody learn how to make wagons run without horses. ”

“ In order to set the lowest possible price, you must have the greatest possible production; and in order to assure the the greatest possible production, you must set the lowest possible price. That's what capital is for; to enable you to set a price based not upon your actual first cost of production but upon what it will cost you to produce when you are producing all you can. ”

“ Ford is often referred to as a man of contradictions. No one is more autocratic, for instance, nor more democratic. He uses his wealth ruthlessly, yet no one is less wealth-conscious. To me he has always seemed one of the most modest of men. ”

“ Wood has no use for the pet formula of Ford's critics—"It isn't Ford, it's Sorensen"—but he goes on to say:
Work is Sorenson's religion. He, too, is not clubby. If a man doesn't seem to be making good, Sorensen is strangely patient with him, and will go to no end of trouble to find out why. Paradoxically, it is the man who does seem to be making good toward whom he seems impatient. Sorenson has the reputation of driving such people pretty hard.
A salesman who makes a good record is especially in for a riding. The salesman may, in his own mind, be aiming at nothing more than $10,000 a car ”

“ Ford marked that something, "Dross."
"That's the big problem," he said, "in any organization—the problem of how to get the dross out. In this diagram here, you see, the dross is all in the kettle, but when you apply enough heat, the dross goes out over the top.
"It isn't the incompetent who destroy an organization. The incompetent never get into a position to destroy it. It is those who have achieved something and want to rest on their achievements who are forever clogging things up. ”

“ Our job was to invent and produce a car which we could make and sell as cheaply as possible for a good many years to come. We did that with Model T, and we think we have done it again. If we haven't, it can be for only one reason—because somebody else succeeds in doing an even better job. So I can't see that the public has lost anything. The only way the public could lose would be through our not doing the best we could."
"Competition is the great teacher"—that is another of Mr. Ford's mottoes. The man who is in business merely for the dollars, he says, can't learn much from words ”

“ Workers on the big modern machine do not work as fast as corn-huskers or hay-pitchers or wood-choppers used to work. It isn't necessary.
If they did so, moreover, they would be likely to get tired, and modern industry knows that it can not afford to let its workers get too tired.
Certainly there is little lugging and lifting and back-breaking hard work in the modern plant. Heavy things can be lifted and lugged much better by machinery, and they are. ”

“ These seeming contradictions are quite understandable if one remembers his fundamental conception of human life. He has no notion that wealth has made him great, and any one who is imprest merely by his wealth bores him. In his personal contacts he likes to dodge the subject. He would prefer to talk with a machinist about machinery, or with somebody who likes birds about birds. ”

“ The job he had set for himself was not to realize some pet scheme, but to make the best car that could be made; and if there was any factor which could still be improved, Henry Ford was all for waiting until the improvement could be incorporated.
Even now, altho the assembling line was in action and a number of cars were being turned out daily, I could not learn the exact date when mass production would begin. For each car built by machinery was now being tested as completely as the "experimental" cars had been ”

“ Men used to working alone naturally find it irksome to work in concert with so many other men, especially if they are getting on in years and have learned their trade in what they call the "good old days" when the standard of living was a small fraction of what it is to-day. ”

“ To keep an industry pure, you've got to keep it in perpetual ferment. As for those salesmen, everything that's happened so far suits me. I know some people think that salesmen make cars; we believe that a car, if it's good enough, will make salesmen. If we're wrong, of course, we'll discover it some time. That's the beauty of competition. Competition is mainly competition in discovering the truth." Remarking that the new Ford car doesn't look anything like the old one, the visitor wondered whether there were to be equally revolutionary changes in the manufacturer's industrial policies, and Mr. ”

“ As a matter of fact, "speeding up" in the modern factory does not mean what those who read about it think it does. They think it means the double-quick of military tactics, whereas it simply means more coordination of effort. ”

“ Now, if we're going to produce cars as cheaply as we can, we've got to figure on producing them for more than one season. If we change models every few months, the public must pay for the change or else refuse to pay, which means that we must go out of business. ”

“ He won't make appointments for mere conversation. You either find him or you don't. He likes to chat with people, but he keeps himself foot-loose. His time is altogether too precious to have every minute of it scheduled for weeks in advance. ”

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