Railroads Quotes - Page 4

• When my friends and I played cowboys and Indians, I was always the Chinese railroad worker.

  Robin Williams

  Cowboy, Chinese, Workers

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• That's our mirror. Every dip, every crash, every bubble that's burst, a testament to our brilliant stupidity. This one gave us the railroads. This one the Internet. This one the slave trade. And if we hope to do anything about saving the environment, or getting to other worlds, we'll need a bubble for that too. Everything I've ever done in my life worth anything has been done in a bubble: in a state of extreme hope and trust and stupidity.

  Lucy Prebble

  Mirrors, Other Worlds, Stupidity

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• Behaviorism proposes to study human behavior according to the methods developed by animal and infant psychology. It seeks to investigate reflexes and instincts, automatisms and unconscious reactions. But it has told us nothing about the reflexes that have built cathedrals, railroads, and fortresses, the instincts that have produced philosophies, poems, and legal systems, the automatisms that have resulted in the growth and decline of empires, the unconscious reactions that are splitting atoms.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Philosophy, Animal, Psychology

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• Wherever a ship ploughs the sea, or a plough furrows the field; wherever a mine yields its treasure; wherever a ship or a railroad train carries freight to market; wherever the smoke of the furnace rises, or the clang of the loom resounds; even in the lonely garret where the seamstress plies her busy needle--there is industry.

  James A. Garfield

  Lonely, Yield, Sea

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• The system of transportation is not coherent; it is not treated as integral. Roads compete with with railroads and airlines in chaotic fashion, and at immense cost to the nation.

  Anthony Stafford Beer

  Fashion, Cost, Transportation

  "Management Science" by Anthony Stafford Beer, (p. 186), 1968.

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• a TEN-YEAR-OLD lad in Indianapolis who was arrested for picking up coal along the side of railroad tracks is now in jail. If the boy had known enough to steal the whole railroad he would be heralded as a Napoleon of finance.

  Mother Jones

  Boys, Years, Jail

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• I judge property myself by its net earning power; that is the only rule I have been able to get.... This whole island [Manhattan] was once bought for a few strings of beads. But now you will find this property valued by its earning power, by its rent power, and that is the way to value a railroad or telegraph.

  Jay Gould

  Islands, Judging, Manhattan

  "Jay Gould: A Character Sketch" by William T. Stead, in The Review of Reviews. Testimony to the New York Senate Committee on Labor and Education, February 1893.

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• While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.

  Howard Zinn

  Men, Class, Rags

  Howard Zinn (2015). “A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present”, p.254, Routledge

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• People don't like railroad tracks near them? We'll see how they feel when the percentage of U.S. citizens who can afford to drive a car goes way down, as it will.

  James Howard Kunstler

  People, Track, Car

  Interview With Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org.

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• I didn't grow up with Broadway music. My mother played Perry Como, while I listened to Andy Williams records. Later on it was Cream, Grand Funk Railroad and lots of R&B like the Isley Bros. and Parliament.

  Donny Osmond

  Mother, Growing Up, Records

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• We're still promoting stupid wasteful behavior in agribusiness - everything from ethanol production for cars to genetically modified crops. In commerce just about everything we do politically is in the service of WalMart and the systems tied to it. In transportation, we could, for instance, have compelled General Motors to produce railroad rolling stock as a condition of their bail-out, but we didn't do that. Instead, we're chasing the phantom of electric cars - and, believe me, we are going to be mortally disappointed how that works out.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Stupid, Believe, Work Out

  Source: www.terrain.org

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• Thank God for Canada! In the context of this narrative [in Underground] and beyond, Canada was certainly an additional option for the many traveling the treacherous terrain of the Underground Railroad in pursuit of what was perceived as "freedom."

  Aisha Hinds

  Thank God, Canada, Narrative

  Source: www.theaquarian.com

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• I lived a few miles outside of a tiny town in central Oklahoma. I would often run amok though the fields of wheat, the patches of trees, along the railroad tracks, and on red dirt roads. This had a profound effect on my view of the world - vast, open-ended, full of opportunity, and ready for exploration.

  Chelsea Manning

  Running, Opportunity, Oklahoma

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I think that most of the candidates [for presidency] can't run the railroad, and I still worry that whoever gets elected will have policies designed for political rather than practical reasons.

  Michael Bloomberg

  Running, Thinking, Worry

  Source: asia.nikkei.com

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• [My muse] likes to inhabit tea leaves, sunlight filtered through bamboo, melancholy clouds over the Devon coastline, a weedy railroad crossing in the Southern States, bubblegum pop from the sixties, torch songs from the forties, undersea caves where B-movie octopi grapple with men in loincloths, sacred groves of pink anime dryads, Victorian fairy paintings executed by gentlemen in lunatic asylums and so on.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Song, Anime, Men

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• If Ayn Rand were an up-and-coming author today, she wouldn't write about steel or railroads, it would be Net Neutrality.

  Mark Cuban

  Writing, Would Be, Steel

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• I would speculate that a critical mass of the population has to internalize a middle class outlook first. International aid experience has demonstrated many times that just building railroads doesn't get you there. You need people ready to sue them.

  Charles R. Morris

  Class, People, Population

  Interview with Bob Morris, bobmorris.biz. December 17, 2012.

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• It is still news to her that passion could steer her wrong though she went down, a thousand times strung out across railroad tracks, off bridges under cars, or stiff glass bottle still in hand, hair soft on greasy pillows, still it is news she cannot follow love (his burning footsteps in blue crystal snow) & still come out all right.

  Diane di Prima

  Passion, Glasses, Hair

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• What opened up the American West was the fact that you owned the real estate. You owned the gold mines, the oil wells. The creation of these, back then, million dollar industries drove the railroads and eventually the airlines to provide this kind of transportation.

  Peter Diamandis

  Real, Oil, American West

  "Big Think Interview With Peter Diamandis". Interview with Paul Hoffman, bigthink.com. January 26, 2010.

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• Ever bike? Now that's something that makes life worth living!... Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds, avoiding collisions, at twenty miles or more an hour, and wondering all the time when you're going to smash up. Well, now, that's something! And then go home again after three hours of it... and then to think that tomorrow I can do it all over again!

  Jack London

  Sports, Home, Thinking

  "The Letters of Jack London: 1913-1916". Stanford University Press. Volume three, 1988.

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• I was the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad.

  Harriet Tubman

  Underground Railroad, Conductor

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• The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link. The men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Track, Ponds

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “Walden and on the Duty of Civil Disobedience”, p.98, Library of Alexandria

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• In the railroads, some people read clearly printed departure signs and then proceed to ask several times what they say. On airplanes, they demand things they know they cannot have. In their cars, they load up, drive away and then suddenly realize they don't know where they're going.

  Lucinda Franks

  Airplane, Car, People

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• Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

  Henry David Thoreau

  New York, Mean, Texas

  1854 Walden, or Life in the Woods,'Economy'.

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• The Chinamen built the railroad, the Indians saved the Pilgrim,
  And in return, the Pilgrim killed 'em.
  They call it it Thanksgiving, I call your holiday 'hell-day.'

  Nas

  Rap, Holiday, Hip Hop

  Song: What Goes Around, Album: Stillmatic, 2001

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