Railway Quotes - Page 2

• [Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.

  Julian Barnes

  Hate, Stupid, Moving

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• Always stay sharp on railways and cruise ships for transit has a way of making everything clear.

  Anna Godbersen

  Travel, Way, Ships

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• A lot of the roads, bridges, railways, and such are built through the use of forced labor, and that is causing the people great suffering. What we put into this in the form of human suffering is not worth what comes out of it.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Bridges, People, Suffering

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• Wealth and speed are what the world admires, what each pursues. Railways, express mails, steamships and every possible facility for communications are the achievement in which the civilized world view and revels, only to languish in mediocrity by that very fact. Indeed, the effect of this diffusion is to spread the culture of the mediocre.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Communication, Views, Achievement

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1963). “Goethe's world view: presented in his reflections and maxims”

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• Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

  C. S. Lewis

  Loss, Evil, Decision

  "The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics".

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• It is very difficult to say nowadays where the suburbs of London come to an end and where the country begins. The railways, instead of enabling Londoners to live in the country have turned the countryside into a city.

  Anthony Trollope

  Country, Science, Cities

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• What, then, do they want a government for? Not to regulate commerce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion, not to administer charity; not to make roads and railways; but simply to defend the natural rights of man -- to protect person and property -- to prevent the aggressions of the powerful upon the weak -- in a word, to administer justice. This is the natural, the original, office of a government. It was not intended to do less: it ought not to be allowed to do more.

  Herbert Spencer

  Powerful, Men, Rights

  Herbert Spencer (2016). “The Man versus the State: Great Essays”, p.125, VM eBooks

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• The 19th century was the great period of engineering, thanks to the railways, thanks to lots of discoveries in metallurgy.

  Joe Harris

  Discovery, Engineering, Thanks

  "Eiffel Tower Celebrates 125th Birthday". Interview With Jeremy Hobson, wwno.org. April 4, 2014.

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• All governments, Books, customs, buildings, railways, ships, and all the stark realities that men have made, Are but imagination's utterances.

  Henry Abbey

  Book, Reality, Men

  Henry Abbey, “Eleusinia”

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• First Europe, and then the globe, will be linked by flight, and nations so knit together that they will grow to be next-door neighbors. . . . What railways have done for nations, airways will do for the world.

  Claude Grahame-White

  Doors, Europe, Together

  Claude Grahame-White, Harry Harper (1915). “The aeroplane”

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• Wagon is the bread-earning horse of the Railways. Load it adequately. Make it run and don't stable it.

  Lalu Prasad Yadav

  Running, Horse, Earning

  "Lalu to teach management at IIM-A". in.rediff.com. August 30, 2006.

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• But how do European railways manage without them? How do they continue to convey millions of travellers and mountains of luggage across a continent? If companies owning railways have been able to agree, why should railway workers, who would take possession of railways, not agree likewise? And if the Petersburg-Warsaw Company and that of Paris-Belfort can act in harmony, without giving themselves the luxury of a common commander, why, in the midst of our societies, consisting of groups of free workers, should we need a Government?

  Peter Kropotkin

  Government, Luxury, Paris

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• By the end of the 20th Century there will be a generation to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen quire of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone... and to live half their time in a railway carriage or in a flying machine.

  Max Nordau

  Flying, Generations, Machines

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• As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enormous amount of punctuation, without anyone being aware of how outrageously subversive I am being.

  Lynne Truss

  Long, Messages, Texting

  "The joy of text" by Will Self, Lynne Truss, www.theguardian.com. July 4, 2008.

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• I met my second husband on a bus. We looked at each other and that was it. We were both married to other people at the time and behaved badly, but we didn't seem to have any choice. We were very happy for nearly 50 years and would still be together if it wasn't for the bloody railways.

  Nina Bawden

  Husband, Years, People

  Interview With Hephzibah Anderson, www.theguardian.com. November 11, 2006.

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• The great Pacific Railway is commenced... Immigration will soon pour into these valleys. Ten millions of emigrants will settle in this golden land in twenty years... This is the grandest enterprise under God!

  George Francis Train

  Years, Land, History

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• Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you've actually spent in doing it. And then calculate the time you've spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories, and reading the newspapers.

  George Orwell

  Dirty, Reading, Thinking

  George Orwell (1986). “Coming Up for Air”, Harvill Secker

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• How like a railway tunnel is the poor man's life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Men, Tunnels, Light

  Christian Nestell Bovee (1862). “Intuitions and Summaries of Thought”, p.13

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• The railway was part scalpel, part movie camera, slicing the city open, parading its inner workings at fifty frames per second. It was on the S-Bahn that she felt least abandoned, as if the act of travelling turned back the clock, and brought her nearer to the future she had lost.

  Philip Sington

  Cities, Cameras, Fifty

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• There have been many definitions of hell, but for the English the best definition is that it is the place where the Germans are the police, the Swedish are the comedians, the Italians are the defense force, Frenchmen dig the roads, the Belgians are the pop singers, the Spanish run the railways, the Turks cook the food, the Irish are the waiters, the Greeks run the government, and the common language is Dutch.

  David Frost

  Sarcastic, Running, Government

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• Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impediments, and bring the man pure to energize. They aid our dealing and conversation, as a railway aids travelling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road, and leaving nothing to be conquered but pure space.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Space, Leaving

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1851). “Essays, lectures and orations”, p.222

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• Just as the sentence contains one idea in all its fullness, so the paragraph should embrace a distinct episode; and as sentences should follow one another in harmonious sequence, so paragraphs must fit into another like the automatic couplings of railway carriages.

  Winston Churchill

  Ideas, Fit, Embrace

  Winston Churchill (2010). “My Early Life: 1874-1904”, p.208, Simon and Schuster

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• Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress.

  Charles Dickens

  Science, House, Progress

  "Dombey and Son".

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• You may think it odd that there were three men to look after one tiny station, but the people who ran the railway knew that if you left two men together in a lonely place they would quarrel, but if you left three men, two of them could always grumble to each other about the third, and then they would be quite happy.

  Joan Aiken

  Lonely, Men, Thinking

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• One of the uses of poetry - one says it to oneself in distressing circumstances, ... or when one has to wait at railway stations, or when one cannot get to sleep at night.

  E. Nesbit

  Sleep, Night, Poetry

  E. Nesbit (2013). “Delphi Complete Novels of E. Nesbit”, p.1027, Delphi Classics

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