Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 December 26#Trying to recall a Henry Ford quote

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= December 26 =

Trying to recall a Henry Ford quote

I'm trying to recall a Henry Ford quote that I heard years ago. A poor paraphrasing from my ailing memory would be:

If every car rolling off my assembly lines could be immediately purchased, then I will make enough cars to fill the Earth.

The point being roughly that the manufacturing part is the easy part, it's the knowing exactly what to manufacture, and the marketing and sales of the product that's the hard part. 731Butai (talk) 15:02, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

:Are you sure it's a Henry Ford quote, as it doesn't sound like something he'd say? Ford was notoriously boastful about how great he was at designing manufacturing processes; the whole "the important part is marketing, not quality" ethos wasn't really something he went in for. ‑ Iridescent 15:20, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

::Yes, I'm sure it was attributed to him; granted, it may have been misattributed , but I'd like to find the misattributed quote just the same. I struck my interpretation of the quote because, like I said, I don't actually remember the quote, so any interpretation would be off the mark and thus not helpful to finding the actual quote. Another interpretation would be: "I'm great at making cars, you people just suck at buying them", which would be more fitting to his image. 731Butai (talk) 17:48, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

:Ford wrote the following in the January 1927 edition of Ford News:

{{cquote|The Model T was one of the largest factors in creating the conditions which now make the new [Model A] Ford possible. The world-wide influence of the Ford car in the building of good roads & in teaching the people the use & value of mechanical power is conceded. Nowadays everybody runs some kind of motor power but twenty years ago only the adventurous few could be induced to try an automobile. It had a harder time winning public confidence than the airplane has now.}}

:Not particularly succinct, but it does perhaps convey the sentiment you're looking for. Tevildo (talk) 18:02, 26 December 2015 (UTC)