I just read this in Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance, describing the increasingly dire situation in the depths of the Great Depression, in 1932. I had never read this before, and I think it’s awesome:
“…Henry Ford, now in his seventies and increasingly autocratic and unreasonable, refused to bail out his son. He had a long-standing antipathy to bankers and could not quite grasp why banks should be allowed to use the money he deposited for making risky loans–‘It’s just as if I put my car in a garage and when I came to get it, I found somebody else had borrowed it and run it into a tree,’ was the way he saw it” (p.442).
Of course the author treats this attitude with disdain as an outdated, unreasonable mode of thinking, but it’s a great quote nonetheless.