"History is more or less bunk"
About this Quote
Henry Ford tossed off a provocation in 1916 that captured his relentless present-tense worldview: "History is more or less bunk. It is tradition. We do not want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinkers dam is the history we make today". Spoken amid the rise of mass production and scientific management, it expressed a factory-floor pragmatism. Value comes from building, testing, and iterating, not from revering the past. He distrusted what he saw as scholastic parade-ground history, heavy on kings and battles, light on tools and results. The spirit is insurgent and democratic: do not let inherited custom shackle invention.
The statement also channels American pragmatism and a populist skepticism toward elites. Knowledge worth having must cash out in practical improvements; tradition is suspect unless it helps a worker solve a problem or a manager design a better workflow. For Ford, time spent recounting yesterday often meant time stolen from making tomorrow. It is no accident he said this after launching the $5 day and the moving assembly line; the past looked slow and ceremonial next to the clatter of his plants.
Yet the line is both shrewd and shortsighted. He later built one of the great museums of American innovation and Greenfield Village, curating artifacts from Edison, Lincoln, and early artisans. That effort suggests he valued history when it was tactile, exemplary, and technologically instructive. And his own career offers a counterargument: clinging to the Model T while General Motors studied consumer preferences, color, and annual model changes was a costly refusal to read the historical signals of a maturing market. The aphorism warns against paralyzing nostalgia, but taken literally it blinds strategy. The past is not a cage; it is a workshop. Properly used, it supplies patterns, warnings, and inspirations for the very future Ford so urgently wanted to manufacture.
The statement also channels American pragmatism and a populist skepticism toward elites. Knowledge worth having must cash out in practical improvements; tradition is suspect unless it helps a worker solve a problem or a manager design a better workflow. For Ford, time spent recounting yesterday often meant time stolen from making tomorrow. It is no accident he said this after launching the $5 day and the moving assembly line; the past looked slow and ceremonial next to the clatter of his plants.
Yet the line is both shrewd and shortsighted. He later built one of the great museums of American innovation and Greenfield Village, curating artifacts from Edison, Lincoln, and early artisans. That effort suggests he valued history when it was tactile, exemplary, and technologically instructive. And his own career offers a counterargument: clinging to the Model T while General Motors studied consumer preferences, color, and annual model changes was a costly refusal to read the historical signals of a maturing market. The aphorism warns against paralyzing nostalgia, but taken literally it blinds strategy. The past is not a cage; it is a workshop. Properly used, it supplies patterns, warnings, and inspirations for the very future Ford so urgently wanted to manufacture.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|---|
| Source | Henry Ford, My Life and Work (1922) — contains the line "History is more or less bunk." |
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