William Crapo “Billy” Durant (1861–1947) was an American industrialist. A leading pioneer of the United States automobile industry, he was the co-founder of General Motors, one of the first and the largest corporations in the world. He also co-founded the home appliances company Frigidaire.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Durant grew up in Flint, Michigan, and established a carriage company in 1886. In 1903, he took over a small firm in 1903 and began to manufacture Buick motorcars. He bought Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Oakland (Pontiac,) and other smaller automotive manufacturers to form the General Motors Company in 1908. After financial problems, Durant lost control of the company in 1910. With the financial backing of the Du Pont family, he established the Chevrolet Motor Company with Louis Chevrolet and acquired control of General Motors in 1915.
By 1919, General Motors was one of the largest American industrial enterprises. Post-World War I financial troubles again forced him out of General Motors in 1920. He started Durant Motors and other ventures later in life, but they were generally unsuccessful. Durant was forced into bankruptcy in 1936 and spent the last years of his life with allowances from Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. and other General Motors’s managers.
Axel Madsen’s Deal Maker: How William C. Durant Made General Motors (1999) and William Pelfrey’s Billy, Alfred, and General Motors (2006) are unique profiles of Durant and General Motors.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by William C. Durant
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Civilization
The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Business, Reason
Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Wisdom, Ignorance, Progress, Learn, Discover, Education
As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.
—William C. Durant
Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Knowledge, Desire
Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Discipline
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Historians, Cleverness, History, Silence
It may be true that you can’t fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Country, Patriotism
The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Health
The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It’s the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Ego
We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street an Broadway.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Freedom
Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Teachers, Teaching
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes, rather than their minds.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Hope, Thinking, Mind, Acceptance, Wishes, The Mind
The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Politics
In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Forgiveness, Liberty
What better way is there no make men love one another than to make men understand one another. True charity comes only with clarity-just as mercy is but justice that understands. Surely the root of all evil is the inability to see clearly that which is.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Understanding
To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Integrity
Cultivate your garden … Do not depend upon teachers to educate you … follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony … In the end, education, like happiness, is individual, and must come to us from life and from ourselves. There is no way; each pilgrim must make his own path. “Happiness,” said Chamfort, “is not easily won; it is hard to find it in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere.”
—William C. Durant
Topics: Joy, Curiosity
Civilization is the order and freedom promoting cultural activity.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Civilization
Destroy it. There may be a redistribution of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as the old.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Prejudice
Education is the transmission of civilization.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Education, Civilization
Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you’re going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Failures, Mistakes, The Present
Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
—William C. Durant
Ultimately, our troubles are due to dogma and deduction; we find no new truth because we take some venerable but questionable proposition as the indubitable starting point, and never think of putting this assumption itself to a test of observation or experiment.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Truth
To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Harmony
Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Morality, Morals
Nothing is new except arrangement.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Plagiarism
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Living, Civilization
No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Haste
When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Order
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