Time & Perspective Quote by Charles F. Kettering

The line snaps like a garage door spring: practical, witty, and pointedly impatient with nostalgia. Kettering isn’t offering a dreamy hymn to progress; he’s issuing a mechanic’s objection to a common cultural habit: treating the future as a punchline, a threat, or an indulgent fantasy. His genius is to drag the argument out of ideology and into logistics. You can sneer at tomorrow all you want, he implies, but you’re still waking up there.

The intent is defensive and recruiting at once. As an inventor who helped electrify everyday life (from automotive ignition to industrial R&D culture), Kettering lived inside the backlash cycle that greets new technology: fear of change, suspicion of experts, romanticizing “the way things were.” His “I object” frames pessimism as a kind of bad civic hygiene, not a personality trait. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the self-protective cynic: dunking on the future is easy because it can’t answer back yet.

The subtext is bracingly mortal. You don’t get to opt out of time. The future isn’t an abstract policy debate; it’s the place your body, your job, your kids, your bills are headed. That turns optimism from sentiment into responsibility: if you’re going to live there, you might as well build it, tinker with it, at least stop sabotaging it with fashionable dread.

Context matters: Kettering’s era saw electrification, cars, radios, world wars, and the assembly line reshaping daily life at speed. His quip reads like an inventor’s survival strategy in a century that made “new” unavoidable.