"People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people"
About this Quote
Kettering flips the camera around. The line starts with a familiar caricature: the inventor as “screwball,” a harmless eccentric tinkering in a shed while sensible adults run the world. Then he punctures it with a quieter insult: the real oddity is that society feels entitled to label the creator, but never curious enough to ask what the creator has learned about them.
The specific intent is defensive, but not self-pitying. Kettering is arguing for respect by exposing a double standard in how we assign credibility. “People think” is doing a lot of work: it’s the voice of the crowd, a lazy consensus that treats originality as a personality defect. By contrast, “no one ever asks” suggests a systematic failure of imagination. The public consumes inventions while refusing the inventor full membership in the social conversation.
The subtext is sharper: the inventor likely sees the public as risk-averse, status-driven, and a little parasitic - happy to take the benefits of breakthrough, quick to sneer at the person who made it possible. There’s also an implicit critique of how modernity packages innovation as product, not process. Once the novelty becomes normal, the discomfort that produced it gets memory-holed.
Context matters. Kettering worked inside big American industry (GM, Delco) when invention was becoming professionalized, corporatized, and mythologized at once. The “screwball” tag is what society uses to keep its distance from disruptive thinking. His comeback insists that the disruptive thinker has a verdict, too.
The specific intent is defensive, but not self-pitying. Kettering is arguing for respect by exposing a double standard in how we assign credibility. “People think” is doing a lot of work: it’s the voice of the crowd, a lazy consensus that treats originality as a personality defect. By contrast, “no one ever asks” suggests a systematic failure of imagination. The public consumes inventions while refusing the inventor full membership in the social conversation.
The subtext is sharper: the inventor likely sees the public as risk-averse, status-driven, and a little parasitic - happy to take the benefits of breakthrough, quick to sneer at the person who made it possible. There’s also an implicit critique of how modernity packages innovation as product, not process. Once the novelty becomes normal, the discomfort that produced it gets memory-holed.
Context matters. Kettering worked inside big American industry (GM, Delco) when invention was becoming professionalized, corporatized, and mythologized at once. The “screwball” tag is what society uses to keep its distance from disruptive thinking. His comeback insists that the disruptive thinker has a verdict, too.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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