Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles F. Kettering

Kettering’s line reads like an inventor’s battle report: progress doesn’t arrive with applause, it arrives with resistance. The first clause is blunt, almost weary - “the world hates change” - a compressing of every boardroom stall, customer complaint, and institutional reflex into four words. Then comes the pivot that matters: “yet it is the only thing.” He’s not arguing change is good in the abstract; he’s arguing it’s the toll you pay to cross into the future.

The intent is practical, not poetic. Kettering spent his career inside the machinery of adoption: the self-starter, modern ignition, industrial electrification - innovations that solved real problems while threatening entrenched habits and sunk investments. The subtext is aimed at gatekeepers who want the benefits of innovation without the discomfort of transition. People will say they want “progress,” but they often mean “improvement that doesn’t disrupt my status, workflow, or identity.” Kettering punctures that fantasy.

It also works because it frames change as socially unpopular but historically undefeated. By casting “the world” as a single grumpy organism, he normalizes backlash: if your idea is meeting friction, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s wrong; it may mean it’s real. There’s a quiet managerial edge too - a permission slip for risk, iteration, and temporary ugliness. Progress, in this worldview, isn’t a smooth narrative of betterment; it’s a sequence of tolerated disturbances that eventually get renamed “the way things are.”