My highlights from the book:

1. Power and machinery, money and goods, are useful only as they set us free to live. They are but means to an end.

2. The fact that the commercial success of the Ford Motor Company has been most unusual is important only because it serves to demonstrate, in a way which no one can fail to understand, that the theory to date is right. Considered solely in this light I can criticize the prevailing system of industry and the organization of money and society from the standpoint of one who has not been beaten by them.

3. As things are now organized, I could, were I thinking only selfishly, ask for no change. If I merely want money the present system is all right; it gives the money in plenty to me. But I am thinking of service. The present system does not permit of the best service because it encourages every kind of waste — it keeps many men from getting the full return from service.

4. I have no quarrel with the general attitude of scoffing at new ideas. It is better to be skeptical of all new ideas and to insist upon being shown rather than to rush around in a continuous brainstorm after every new idea. 

5. Skepticism, if by that we mean cautiousness, is the balance wheel of civilization. 

6. Most of the present acute troubles of the world arise out of taking on new ideas without first carefully investigating to discover if they are good ideas. 

7. An idea is not necessarily good because it is old, or necessarily bad because it is new, but if an old idea works, then the weight of the evidence is all in its favor. 

8. Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. There can be no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist that all men are equal. Most certainly all men are not equal, and any democratic conception which strives to make men equal is only an effort to block progress. 

12. Men cannot be of equal service. The men of larger ability are less numerous than the men of smaller ability; it is possible for a mass of the smaller men to pull the larger ones down — but in so doing they pull themselves down. It is the larger men who give the leadership to the community and enable the smaller men to live with less effort.

13. A man ought to be able to live on a scale commensurate with the service that he renders.

14. Monopoly is bad for business. Profiteering is bad for business. The lack of necessity to hustle is bad for business. 

15. Money chasing is not business.

16. Money comes naturally as the result of service. 

 17. 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.

18. My effort is in the direction of simplicity. 

19. Real simplicity means that which gives the very best service and is the most convenient in use.

20. Start with an article that suits and then study to find some way of eliminating the entirely useless parts.

21. The essence of my idea then is that waste and greed block the delivery of true service. Both waste and greed are unnecessary. Waste is due largely to not understanding what one does, or being careless in doing of it. Greed is merely a species of nearsightedness. 

22. I have striven toward manufacturing with a minimum of waste, both of materials and of human effort, and then toward distribution at a minimum of profit, depending for the total profit upon the volume of distribution.

23. The institution that we have erected is performing a service. The principles of that service are these: 

—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.

—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. 

—The putting of service before profit. Without a profit, business cannot extend. There is nothing inherently wrong about making a profit. Well-conducted business enterprise cannot fail to return a profit, but profit must and inevitably will come as a reward for good service. It cannot be the basis — it must be the result of service. 

—Manufacturing is not buying low and selling high. It is the process of buying materials fairly and, with the smallest possible addition of cost, transforming those materials into a consumable product and giving it to the consumer. Gambling, speculating, and sharp dealing, tend only to clog this progression.

24. The idea of gas engines was by no means new , but this was the first time that a really serious effort had been made to put them on the market. They were received with interest rather than enthusiasm and I do not recall any one who thought that the internal combustion engine could ever have more than a limited use. 

25. All the wise people demonstrated conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never thought that it might carve out a career for itself. 

26. That is the way with wise people — they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. 

27. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work.

28. Every night and all of every Saturday night I worked on the new motor. I cannot say that it was hard work. No work with interest is ever hard.

29. There was no "demand" for automobiles — there never is for a new article. 

30. At first, the "horseless carriage" was considered merely a freak notion and many wise people explained with particularity why it could never be more than a toy. 

31. In the beginning, there was hardly anyone who sensed that the automobile could be a large factor in industry. The most optimistic hoped only for a development akin to that of the bicycle. 

32. The most surprising feature of business as it was conducted was the large attention given to finance and the small attention to service. That seemed to me to be reversing the natural process which is that the money should come as the result of work and not before the work.

33. A business ought to start small and build itself up and out of its earnings. If there are no earnings then that is a signal to the owner that he is wasting his time and does not belong in that business. 

34. I noticed a tendency among many men in business to feel that their lot was hard — they worked against a day when they might retire and live on an income — get out of the strife. Life to them was a battle to be ended as soon as possible. 

35. If to petrify is success all one has to do is to humor the lazy side of the mind but if to grow is success, then one must wake up anew every morning and keep awake all day.

36. Life, as I see it, is not a location, but a journey.

37. Businessmen go down with their businesses because they like the old way so well they cannot bring themselves to change. One sees them all about — men who do not know that yesterday is past, and who woke up this morning with their last year's ideas.

38. Leisure and work bring different results. If a man wants leisure and gets it — then he has no cause to complain. But he cannot have both leisure and the results of work.

39. I refuse to recognize that there are impossibilities. I cannot discover that anyone knows enough about anything on this earth definitely to say what is and what is not possible.

40. That which one has to fight hardest against in bringing together a large number of people to do work is excess organization and consequent red tape. To my mind, there is no bent of mind more dangerous than that which is sometimes described as the "genius for organization." This usually results in the birth of a great big chart showing, after the fashion of a family tree, how authority ramifies. The tree is heavy with nice round berries, each of which bears the name of a man or of an office. Every man has a title and certain duties which are strictly limited by the circumference of his berry. If a straw boss wants to say something to the general superintendent, his message has to go through the sub - foreman, the foreman, the department head, and all the assistant superintendents, before, in the course of time, it reaches the general superintendent. Probably by that time what he wanted to talk about is already history.

41. Very few things are ever taken under "official consideration" until long after the time when they actually ought to have been done. The buck is passed to and fro and all responsibility is dodged by individuals — following the lazy notion that two heads are better than one. 

42. Now a business, in my way of thinking, is not a machine. It is a collection of people who are brought together to do work and not to write letters to one another.

43. If a man is doing his work he will not have time to take up any other work. 

44. It is not necessary to have meetings to establish a good feeling between individuals or departments. It is not necessary for people to love each other in order to work together. Too much good fellowship may indeed be a very bad thing, for it may lead to one man trying to cover up the faults of another.

45. Our employment office does not bar a man for anything he has previously done — he is equally acceptable whether he has been in Sing Sing or at Harvard and we do not even inquire from which place he has graduated.

46. All of our people have thus come up from the bottom. The head of the factory started as a machinist. The man in charge of the big River Rouge plant began as a patternmaker. Another man overseeing one of the principal departments started as a sweeper. There is not a single man anywhere in the factory who did not simply come in off the street.

47. If we have a tradition it is this: Everything can always be done better than it is being done.

48. There are far too many assumptions about what human nature ought to be and not enough research into what it is.

49. My own financial operations have been very simple. I started with the policy of buying and selling for cash, keeping a large fund of cash always on hand, taking full advantage of all discounts, and collecting interest on bank balances.

50. The minutes we spend on a competitor's business we lose on our own. 

51. We are not against borrowing money and we are not against bankers. We are against trying to make borrowed money take the place of work.

52. We are against the kind of banker who regards a business as a melon to be cut.

53. People buy what helps them just as naturally as they drink water.

54. When a business becomes congested with bad methods; when a business becomes ill through lack of attention to one or more of its functions; when executives sit comfortably back in their chairs as if the plans they inaugurated are going to keep them going forever; when business becomes a mere plantation on which to live, and not a big work which one has to do — then you may expect trouble.

55. I hold that it is better to sell a large number of articles at a small profit than to sell a few at a large profit.

56. There is something sacred about wages — they represent homes and families and domestic destinies. People ought to tread very carefully when approaching wages. On the cost sheet, wages are mere figures; out in the world, wages are bread boxes and coal bins, babies' cradles, and children's education — family comforts and contentment.

57. It has been our policy always to keep on hand a large amount of cash. Keeping the cash reserve makes borrowing unnecessary — our provision is only to be prepared to meet an emergency.

58. We cut the overhead charge from $ 146 a car to $ 93 a car, and when you realize what this means on more than four thousand cars a day you will have an idea how, not by economy, not by wage-cutting, but by the elimination of waste, it is possible to make an "impossible" price.

59. You will note that the financiers proposed to cure by lending money and not by bettering methods. They did not suggest putting in an engineer; they wanted to put in a treasurer.

60. Waste is prevented by far-sighted, not by short-sighted men. Short-sighted men think first of money. They cannot see waste. They think of service as altruistic instead of as the most practical thing in the world.

61. To teach a child to invest and use is better than to teach him to save. Most men who are laboriously saving a few dollars would do better to invest those few dollars — first in themselves, and then in some useful work. 

62. Young men ought to invest rather than save. They ought to invest in themselves to increase creative value. You are not "saving" when you prevent yourself from becoming more productive. You are really taking away from your ultimate capital.

63. Thomas Edison’s knowledge is almost universal. He is interested in every conceivable subject and he recognizes no limitations. He believes that all things are possible. At the same time, he keeps his feet on the ground. He goes forward step by step. He regards "impossible" as a description for that which we have not at the moment the knowledge to achieve. He knows that as we amass knowledge we build the power to overcome the impossible. That is the rational way of doing the "impossible." The irrational way is to make the attempt without the toil of accumulating knowledge.

64. The man who is too set to change is dead already. The funeral is a mere detail.

65. A man who cannot think is not an educated man however many college degrees he may have acquired. Thinking is the hardest work anyone can do — which is probably the reason why we have so few thinkers.

66. If education consisted in warning the young student away from some of the false theories on which men have tried to build, so that he may be saved the loss of the time in finding out by bitter experience, its good would be unquestioned.

67. A man's real education begins after he has left school. True education is gained through the discipline of life.

68. The point is this: Great piles of knowledge in the head are not the same as mental activity. A man may be very learned and very useless. And then again , a man may be unlearned and very useful.

69. Idleness never created a job. It creates only burdens.

70. I pity the poor fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always have "an atmosphere of good feeling" around him before he can do his work. There are such men. And in the end, unless they obtain enough mental and moral hardiness to lift them out of their soft reliance on "feeling," they are failures. 

71. Not only are they business failures; they are character failures also; it is as if their bones never attained a sufficient degree of hardness to enable them to stand on their own feet. There is altogether too much reliance on good feelings in our business organizations.

72. The business of life is easy or hard according to the skill or the lack of skill displayed in production and distribution. It has been thought that business existed for profit. That is wrong. Business exists for service.

73. If I did not think so I would not keep working — for the money that I make is inconsequent. Money is useful only as it serves to forward by practical example the principle that business is justified only as it serves, that it must always give more to the community than it takes away, and that unless everybody benefits by the existence of a business then that business should not exist.

74. Poverty cannot be abolished by formula; it can be abolished only by hard and intelligent work.

75. There is always something to be done in this world, and only ourselves to do it.

76. Every advance begins in a small way and with the individual.

77. We live in flabby times when men are being taught that everything ought to be easy. Work that amounts to anything will never be easy.

78. Every man who works ought to have sufficient leisure. The man who works hard should have his easy chair, his comfortable fireside, his pleasant surroundings. These are his by right. But no one deserves ease until after his work is done.

79. Flesh and blood should not be made to bear burdens that steel can bear.