Henry Ford Quotes

… increased industrial efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less labor

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.

There are many machines throughout history that were built to do something better than a human can.

I loved my computer; it's a tool. A tool increases your mechanical advantages. It allows you to use your strengths and talents to greater advantage, and that's what tools do, and that's what my computer does for me. It's not my toy, it's my tool.

Every man must admit that by means of instruments and machines the labourer can execute tasks he could not possibly perform without them; that he can perform a greater quantity of work in a given time, and that he can perform the work with greater nicety and accuracy than he could possibly do had he no instruments and machines.

The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody's time never watches the foreman never talks back.

I want to push technology boundaries to be more efficient.

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.

The marriage of Capital with Science was responsible for the great leap forward into what we live in today. Pure scientists discovered the components into which the natural environment could be decomposed; investors placed their bets on the various methods of decomposition; applied scientists or managers saw to it that the wage workers in their charge carried the project through. Social scientists sought ways to make the workers less human, more efficient and machine-like. Thanks to science, capitalists were able to transform much of the natural environment into a processed world, an artifice, and to reduce most human beings into efficient tenders of the artifice.

Read the story of the new invention for picking cotton. It may not be perfect yet, it may not work so well in hilly country as on the plains, but it is just a question of time before it is improved. More men and women out of work. Unless we have sense enough to sit down and discuss how to use this new invention and many others, so as to bring happiness, comfort and leisure to human beings and not unemployment, starvation and despair, then we deserve the hard times which surely will come our way.

… industry is at present producing as much as it did in 1929. [before the Great Depression] Ordinarily this would mean work for everybody, but since the depression, ten million dollars have been spent in modernizing these particular plants with the result that they are now using ten thousand fewer men than in 1929. Two million dollars more is to be spent shortly on further modernization, and much of the heavy work done in the past by men and skilled men, many of them, will be done by machinery. College and high school boys, who stand on a balcony somewhere and press buttons are preferred for this work today, and four men will do the work of one hundred men before long!

We only invest in businesses that reduce labor.

I would love to have access to a company like Caterpillar. I would make all their stuff remote controlled and work ten times as fast.

If you have things or are involved with things that turn on, it's going to have code. And there are so many people - let's pick on the historians - even as a historian, let's say I ended up going the road of being a historian, just knowing some basic scripts, any kind of automation would have made me a 10 times better historian because I wouldn't have to sit there changing every file name to "1234" and then "12345." It can have a transformative value.

Machines were devised not to do a man out of a job, but to take the heavy labor from man's back and place it on the broad back of the machine.

Technology is a resource-liberating force!

The human species is often amazingly inventive and industrious but at the same time profoundly lazy. It's very clear that we humans don't like to work. This aversion to work is so extreme - and our ingenuity so acute - that we're eager to devote countless hours designing and building devices that might shave a few minutes off our workday

Pretty much all of my inventions come about the same way. I have an everyday problem or something that I'm too lazy to do, so I make a machine that does it for me.

I really love to work like a machine.

I'm still an engineer at heart. So if I can automate conversations that I find myself keep having to have, it seems like a good opportunity for me.

Computing is no more about work - it's all about making work happen with computers.

By helping us to be more productive, technology lets us to spend less time focusing on survival, and more on solving other challenges.

Science has gone a long way toward helping man to free himself from the burden of hard labor; yet, science itself is not a liberator. It creates means, not goals. It is up to men to utilize those means to achieve reasonable goals.

Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.

Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.