Sourced

• I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across there and I don’t care. I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.
  • Interview in Chicago Tribune (25 May 1916)

• An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.
  • Remarks from the witness stand, to a court in Mount Clemens, Michigan (July 1919), as quoted in Thesaurus of Epigrams: A New Classified Collection of Witty Remarks, Bon Mots and Toasts (1948) by Edmund Fuller, p. 162

• Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.
  • Remark about the Model T in 1909, published in his autobiography My Life and Work (1922) Chapter IV

• I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one — and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces.
  • My Life and Work (1922)] Chapter IV.

• I adopted the theory of Reincarnation when I was twenty six. Religion offered nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work is futile if we cannot utilise the experience we collect in one life in the next. When I discovered Reincarnation it was as if I had found a universal plan I realised that there was a chance to work out my ideas. Time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock. Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more. The discovery of Reincarnation put my mind at ease. If you preserve a record of this conversation, write it so that it puts men’s minds at ease. I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us.
  • Interview in the San Francisco Examiner (26 August 1928)

• 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.
  • On reasons for the Great Depression, as quoted in The Zanesville Sunday Times-Signal [Zanesville, Ohio] (15 March 1931); also in A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

• You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.
  • As quoted in International Encyclopedia of Prose and Poetical Quotations (1951) by William S. Walsh

• A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.
  • As quoted in News Journal [Mansfield, Ohio] (3 August 1965)

• When I see an Alfa Romeo go by, I tip my hat.
  • As quoted in Alfa Romeo. I creatori della Leggenda (1990) by Griffith Borgeson

• You will find men who want to be carried on the shoulders of others, who think that the world owes them a living. They don't seem to see that we must all lift together and pull together.
  • As quoted in Wisdom & Inspiration for the Spirit and Soul (2004) by Nancy Toussaint, p. 85

• As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty spread and special privilege grow.
  • My Life and Work by Henry Ford (Autobiography)