This is excerpt from Autobiography of Henry Ford in his own word. If you like this book you can request from benabbey2010@gmail.com

Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. Almost any one can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product.

The natural thing to do is to work—to recognize that prosperity and happiness can be obtained only through honest effort. Human ills flow largely from attempting to escape from this natural course.

We learn also that while men may decree social laws in conflict with natural laws, Nature vetoes
those laws more ruthlessly than did the Czars. Nature has vetoed the whole Soviet Republic.

Freedom is the right to work a decent length of time and to get a decent living for doing so; to be able to arrange the little personal details of one's own life. It is the aggregate of these and many other items of freedom which makes up the great idealistic Freedom.

There is in this country a sinister element that desires to creep in between the men who work with their hands and the men who think and plan for the men who work with their hands.

The primary functions are agriculture, manufacture, and transportation. Community life is impossible without them. They hold the world together. Raising things, making things, and earning things are as primitive as human need and yet as modern as anything can be. They are of the essence of physical life.


The foundations of society are the men and means to grow things, to make things, and to carry things. As long as agriculture, manufacture, and transportation survive, the world can survive any economic or social change. As we serve our jobs we serve the world.

There is plenty of work to do. Business is merely work. Speculation in things already produced—that is not business. It is just more or less respectable graft.



it is a waste of time to look to our state capitals or to Washington to do that which law was not designed to do. 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. We have had enough of looking to Washington and we have had enough of legislators

When you get a whole country—as did ours—thinking that Washington is a sort of heaven and behind its clouds dwell omniscience and omnipotence, you are educating that country into a dependent state of mind which augurs ill for the future. Our help does not come from Washington, but from ourselves; our help may, however, go to Washington as a sort of central distribution point where all our efforts are coordinated for the general good. We may help the Government; the Government cannot help us.

The welfare of the country is squarely up to us as individuals. That is where it should be and that is where it is safest. Governments can promise something for nothing but they cannot deliver.

But it is work and work alone that can continue to deliver the goods—and that, down in his heart, is what every man knows.

Most men know they cannot get something for nothing.

If we cannot produce we cannot have

Through work and work alone may health, wealth, and happiness inevitably be secured.

He should most certainly be permitted to take away from the community an equivalent of what he contributes to it. If he contributes nothing he should take away nothing. He should have the freedom of starvation.

There can be no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist that all men are equal.

A man ought to be able to live on a scale commensurate with the service that he renders.
Business is never as healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching for what it gets.
Money comes naturally as the result of service. And it is absolutely necessary to have money. But we do not want to forget that the end of money is not ease but the opportunity to perform more.
service. In my mind nothing is more abhorrent than a life of ease. None of us has any right to ease.
There is no place in civilization for the idler.
Nothing could pay the way farming is conducted. The farmer follows luck and his forefathers. He does not know how economically to produce, and he does not know how to market. A manufacturer who knew how neither to produce nor to market would not long stay in business.

I spent twelve years before I had a Model T—which is what is known to-day as the Ford car—that suited me.
1. An absence of fear of the future and of veneration for the past. One who fears the future, who fears failure, limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail. What is past is useful only as it suggests ways and means for progress.

2. A disregard of competition. Whoever does a thing best ought to be the one to do it. It is criminal to try to get business away from another man—criminal because one is then trying to lower for personal gain the condition of one's fellow man—to rule by force instead of by intelligence.
3. The putting of service before profit. Without a profit, business cannot extend. There is nothing inherently wrong about