Status-Q

I do like collecting quotations.  Here are some of the references to them on this blog, and I also have a collection of favourites here.

But one thing you quickly discover, if you dig a little deeper, is that a large proportion of the most popular favourites cannot be traced reliably to the people to whom they are commonly attributed.  

And here’s the latest example I’ve found… If you’ve done anything related to innovation or product design, you’ve probably heard Henry Ford’s famous comment:

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse!”

This is pretty well-known, but, once again, there seems to be very little evidence that he ever actually said it.  There’s a nice examination of the story on the Quote Investigator site.

If you’re like me, for some reason, you find this slightly disappointing.  But it’s hard to work out quite why.  Is it because, if we agree with a sentiment, and we then find that Henry Ford agrees with it too, it somehow validates our opinion?  “You know, Henry Ford agreed with me on this…”

Anyway, I’ve written about this before, and you can find further discussion of this idea by clicking on the image below.