Quotes & Sayings About Automobiles

I drive Fords, and I've driven American cars all my life, and I want to have a strong American manufacturing sector, especially in automobiles. — Jim DeMint

How to pry the tourists out of their automobiles, out of their back-breaking upholstered mechanized wheelchairs and onto their feet, onto the strange warmth and solidity of Mother Earth again? This is the problem which the Park Service should confront directly, not evasively, and which it cannot resolve by simply submitting and conforming to the automobile habit. — Edward Abbey

There were thousands of parked automobiles out there, twinkling on a vast lake of blacktop. — Kurt Vonnegut

The appeal of the Riverside 500 was based on that overall spectacle of witnessing a mob of brightly colored, bellowing automobiles gamboling over the countryside like a herd of runaway steers. Stock car roadracing is in fact like a mechanical stampede, and we personally think it's maybe the neatest form of motor racing known to man. It's definitely the greatest spectacle in roadracing. — Brock Yates

Any friend of fossil is a friend of mine. We've got to do everything we can to get people out of their automobiles and into mass transit. — Michael Bloomberg

The moonlight came in with the sounds of the city: juke boxes, automobiles, curses, dogs barking, radios ... We were all in it together. — Charles Bukowski

I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge - that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana. — John Kenneth Galbraith

We must get rid of fossil fuels by developing injection systems for automobiles, which can run on bio-fuel. — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

The difference between the best worker on computer hardware and the average may be 2 to 1, if you're lucky. With automobiles, maybe 2 to 1. But in software, it's at least 25 to 1. The difference between the average programmer and a great one is at least that. The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. And when you're in a field where the dynamic range is 25 to 1, boy, does it pay off. — Steve Jobs

The Japanese, despite the trade deficit and their ability to build fabulous automobiles, still think that a guy in a monster suit is all that is needed for a monster movie. — Stephen Hunter

Human rights pale beside the rights of machines. In more and more cities, especially in the great metropolises of the South, people have been banned. Automobiles usurp human space, poison the air, and frequently murder the interlopers who invade their conquered territory -and no one lifts a finger to stop them. Is there a difference between violence that kills by car and that which kills by knife or bullet? (p.231) — Eduardo Galeano

If low-temperature fusion does exist and can be perfected, power generation could be decentralized. Each home could heat itself and produce its own electricity, probably using a form of water as fuel. Even automobiles might be cold-fusion powered. — Charles Platt

The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television. It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of anxiety. — Eric Sevareid

I was recently looking at what they can actually do to reduce consumption of petrol. It would be quite possible to build automobiles out of carbon fibre that would be just as strong, weigh 10 times less and consume 10 times less petrol. — Susan George

If we were driving pure hydrogen automobiles, that automobile would actually help clean up the air because the air coming out of the exhaust would be cleaner than the air going into the engine intake. — Dennis Weaver

Gandhi has sound economic and cultural reasons for encouraging the revival of cottage industries, but he does not counsel a fanatical repudiation of all modern progress. Machinery, trains, automobiles, the telegraph have played important parts in his own colossal life! Fifty years of public service, in prison and out, wrestling daily with practical details and harsh realities in the political world, have only increased his balance, open-mindedness, sanity, and humorous appreciation of the quaint human spectacle. — Paramahansa Yogananda

One result of this productive system is that the middle class has grown from being about 15 percent of the population in 1920 to being 86 percent of the population in 2011. While some of the population always seem to live at the poverty line, the vast majority of Americans today are affluent compared to their grandparents. They have the money to buy the products produced by American industry. In the process, the definition of poverty has changed. The majority of Americans who are classified by the government as living at the poverty level have indoor plumbing, color television sets, cell phones, air-conditioning, washers and dryers, microwaves, automobiles, and access to free health care. They are also a significant buying group. — Arthur Hughes

In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me - a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There they are, figures in a discoloured blur, young men and not so young, the nice ones with automobiles, the dull ones full of suspicions and stinginess. By asking a thousand questions of many heavy souls, I did not learn much. You receive biographies interesting mainly for their coherence. So many are children who from the day of their birth are growing up to be their parents. Look at the voting records, inherited like flat feet. — Elizabeth Hardwick

You talk about German technocracy and you get automobiles. — Gordon Sinclair

Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do. — Ronald Reagan

Production of concrete is the third largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions after electrical power production and automobiles. Moreover, the process used today is essentially the same as that used 150 years ago. Since cement manufacture is responsible for about 5% of global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, reducing energy requirements for concrete manufacture could have a significant impact on both energy and the environment. — Hewitt Crane

You can start by wiping that fucking dumb-ass smile off your rosey, fucking, cheeks! Then you can give me a fucking automobile ... a fucking Datsun, a fucking Toyota, a fucking Mustang, a fucking Buick! Four fucking wheels and a seat! And I really don't care for the way your company left me in the middle of fucking nowhere with fucking keys to a fucking car that isn't fucking there. And I really didn't care to fucking walk down a fucking highway and across a fucking runway to get back here to have you smile at my fucking face. I want a fucking car RIGHT FUCKING NOW! — Steve Martin

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. — Charles Bukowski

Though Emerson is a firm believer in the equality of the female sex, he has some secret reservations, and one of them involves the car. (There is something about these machines that makes men want to pound their chests and roar like gorillas. I speak figuratively, of course.) — Elizabeth Peters

America is addicted to oil ... We must also change how we power our automobiles. We will increase our research in better batteries for hybrid and electric cars and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen. We will also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switch grass. — George W. Bush

My god! i'm thinking, what incredible shit we've put up with most of our lives - the domestic routine (same old jobs, insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessman, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back home in the capital, the foul diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and tv machines and telephones -! ah christ!, i'm thinking, at the same time that i'm waving goodby to that hollering idiot on shore, what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day, while patiently enduring at the same time the creeping strangulation of the clean white collar and the rich but modest four-in-hand garrote) — Edward Abbey

Automobiles are unreliable and dangerous slaves. They frequently revolt and kill their masters. I hate them. — Michael D. O'Brien

In the days before automobiles, people in horse-drawn wagons used to sleep if they were tired. They didn't worry about getting lost, because the horse knew the way home. Your heart knows the way to your gifts. You can trust it to take you to them. — Barbara Sher

Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys' clubs, girls' clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses - 120 war-horses - musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. "The whole of society," concludes the Japanese study, "was laid waste to its very foundations."2698 Lifton's history professor saw not even foundations left. "Such a weapon," he told the American psychiatrist, "has the power to make everything into nothing. — Richard Rhodes

People get really nuts around cars. They get angry at cars, they get angry at their car, they get angry at people driving in cars; there's something really comical about that, about automobiles. — Matt Dillon

In New York, the street adventures are incredible. There are a thousand stories in a single block. You see the stories in the people's faces. You hear the songs immediately. Here in Los Angeles, there are less characters because they're all inside automobiles. — Joni Mitchell

They had hoped, hated, loved, suffered, sung, and wept. They had known loss. They had surrounded and comforted themselves with objects. They had driven automobiles. They had walked dogs and pushed children on swing sets and waited in line at the grocery store. They had said stupid things. They had kept secrets, nurtured grudges, blown upon the embers of regret. They had worshipped a variety of gods or no god at all. They had awakened in the night to the sound of rain. They had apologized. They had attended various ceremonies. They had explained the history of themselves to psychologists, priests, lovers, and strangers in bars. They had, at unexpected moments, experienced bolts of joy so unalloyed, so untethered to events, that they seemed to come from above; they had longed to be known and, sometimes, almost were. Heirs — Justin Cronin

Nearly all of our existing power sources are generators which use a heat cycle. This includes our coal, oil, and gas fired utilities, our automobiles, trucks, and trains, and even our nuclear fission utility power plants. — Wilson Greatbatch

Because Japan had no defense industry, he knew, and not even an airplane industry, the best engineers of a generation were being funneled into other, seemingly more prosaic sectors, like automobiles, for example, and steel. These industries, which in America were having increasing difficulty competing for top engineers, were getting the absolute cream in Japan. This advantage in talent was already making a considerable difference, Hayashi believed, as Japan's heavy industries began to compete in the world's markets. — David Halberstam

What Hicks had wanted most in this world was to run a garage and repair shop with his old chum, Dell Able. Beaufort ended all that. He means to conduct a sort of memorial shop, anyhow, with "Hicks and Able" over the door. He wants to roll up his sleeves and look at the logical and beautiful inwards of automobiles for the rest of his life. — Willa Cather

As I rode back to Detroit, a vision of Henry Ford's industrial empire kept passing before my eyes. In my ears, I heard the wonderful symphony which came from his factories where metals were shaped into tools for men's service. It was a new music, waiting for the composer with genius enough to give it communicable form.
I thought of the millions of different men by whose combined labor and thought automobiles were produced, from the miners who dug the iron ore out of the earth to the railroad men and teamsters who brought the finished machines to the consumer, so that man, space, and time might be conquered, and ever-expanding victories be won against death. — Diego Rivera

Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building. — Jane Jacobs

The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called 'significant literature' will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles. — Raymond Chandler

I do not like the human race. I don't like their heads, I don't like their faces, I don't like their feet, I don't like their conversations, I don't like their hairdos, I don't like their automobiles. — Charles Bukowski

All right, You Great Git, You've asked for it. I'll cover the world in Tastee-Freez and Wimpy Burgers. I'll fill it with concrete runways, motorways, aircraft, television, automobiles, advertising, plastic flowers, frozen food and supersonic bangs. I'll make it so noisy and disgusting that even You'll be ashamed of Yourself! No wonder You've so few friends. You're unbelievable! — Peter Cook

If you design communities for automobiles, you get more automobiles. If you design them for people, you get walkable, livable communities. — Parris Glendening

New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures - from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. — Douglas Rushkoff

Surrounded by noises from televisions, airplanes, subways and automobiles, most of us 'tune out' for self-protection. — Michael J. Gelb

Some years ago a top Ford official was showing the late Walter Reuther through the very automates plant in Cleveland, Ohio and he said to him jokingly, "Walter, you'll have a hard time collecting union dues from these machines." and Walter said, "you are going to have more trouble trying to sell automobiles to them." Both of them let it stop there. There was a logical answer to that ... the owners of the machines could buy automobiles and if you increase the number of owners you increase the number of consumers. — Ronald Reagan

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
esso - so - so - so
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all. — Elizabeth Bishop

They have also been adopting fuel efficiency standards for automobiles in China. — Lester R. Brown

The folks contributing their automobiles and driving labor to Uber, or their property and hosting to Airbnb, make less than minimum-wage employees and don't own a piece of the company even though they constitute the infrastructure. Only money talks. — Douglas Rushkoff

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash
all of them
surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. — John Steinbeck

Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs-anything-but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places. — Edward Abbey

I guarantee you, yoga will compete with computers, music, sports, automobiles, the drug industry. Yoga will take over the world! — Bikram Choudhury

You go to developing countries today and you'll find automobiles that you haven't seen since you're childhood and that's because they really are valuable, they're taken care of, they're repaired, and when something breaks, they just don't buy a new one, they actually fix it. — Nicholas Negroponte

To all accusations of excessive development the administrators can reply, as they will if pressed hard enough, that they are giving the public what it wants, that their primary duty is to serve the public not preserve the wilds. "Parks are for people" is the public relations slogan, which decoded means that the parks are for people-in-automobiles. Behind the slogan is the assumption that the majority of Americans, exactly like the managers of the tourist industry, expect and demand to see their national parks from the comfort, security and convenience of their automobiles.
Is this assumption correct? Perhaps. Does that justify the continued and increasing erosion of the parks? It does not. — Edward Abbey

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: In no matter what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got here. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these games going on that could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the crazymaking games going on today are love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf, and girls' basketball. — Kurt Vonnegut

In all these products, whether iron bridges, locomotives, automobiles, telescopes, cottages, airport-hangars, funicular railways, skyscrapers, or children's toys, the will towards a new style expresses itself. The similarity of these examples to the new creations in art consists in the same striving for clear, pure form which expresses truth in the objects. — Theo Van Doesburg

Capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Children's bodies aren't like automobiles with the assailant's fingerprints lingering on the wheel. The world of sexual abuse is quintessentiall y secret. It is the perfect crime. — Beatrix Campbell

Let anyone who believes that a high standard of living is the achievement of labor unions and government controls ask himself the following question: If one had a "time machine" and transported the united labor chieftains of America, plus three million government bureaucrats, back to the tenth century - would they be able to provide the medieval serf with electric light, refrigerators, automobiles, and television sets? — Ayn Rand

Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and what's in the ice-box and what's in the papers and which neighbors are getting a divorce. — Thomas Merton

Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles. — Paul Fussell

[A Bugatti Veyron is] quite the most stunning piece of automotive engineering ever created ... At a stroke then, the Veyron has rendered everything I've ever said about any other car obsolete. It's rewritten the rule book, moved the goalposts and in the process, given Mother Nature a bloody nose. — Jeremy Clarkson

Keep in mind our Constitution predates the Industrial Revolution. Our founders did not know about electricity, the train, telephones, radio, television, automobiles, airplanes, rockets, nuclear weapons, satellites, or space exploration. There's a lot they didn't know about. It would be interesting to see what kind of document they'd draft today. Just keeping it frozen in time won't hack it. — Ross Perot

Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated with their own excreta. We ourselves are living creatures. We don't want the same to happen to us. — John Brunner

As homeowners see the value of their homes decline, they become more likely to delay purchases of the big items - like automobiles, electronics and home appliances - that are ballasts of the American economy. When those purchases decline, large manufacturing firms, suddenly short on funds, could begin laying off employees. — Charles Duhigg

Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles? — Jane Jacobs

So technologies, whether it is a telephone or an iPhone, computers in general or automobiles, television even, all individualize us. We all sit in front of our iPhones and communicating but are we really communicating? — Henry Mintzberg

We're developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won't be able to think. — Rod Serling

We're cognizant, curious beings, capable of philosophical thought, nuclear physics, repeating Nerf weapons, global consciousness, Glade air fresheners, and sentient automobiles. But we're assholes first. — Nick Offerman

There is no doubt about precisely when folks began racing each other in automobiles. It was the day they built the second automobile. — Richard Petty

I descended to the ocean floor and encountered bloated, symmetrical creatures with pumping white hearts and translucent skin. Collapsed blue civilizations lived down there, fissured and antiseptic, craggy with barnacles and blistering rust. I reached into the heart of the earth, the sky, the moon. I colonized language, mathematics, schemes of chemical order and atomic weight. I studied the manufacture of automobiles, microcircuitry, Kleenex and planets. I memorized the gross national products of nations and hemispheres, the populations of cities and states and principalities, the achievements of presidents, tyrants and kings. I was trying to learn what I suspect Mom had learned already: that there were journeys we all make alone that take us far away from one another. — Scott Bradfield

As the horsepower in modern automobiles steadily rises, the congestion of traffic steadily lowers the average possible speed of your car. This is known as Progress. — Sydney J. Harris

[Bill] Clinton's voice, his manner of speaking and his terminology, "Back in those days ... Yeah, back those days ... You know, we didn't have the internet back then." My grandfather said, "Back in those days, we didn't have automobiles". — Rush Limbaugh

From CATS ARE KIND
I saw a dog pursuing automobiles;
On and on he sped.
I was puzzled by this;
I accosted the dog.
'If you catch one,' I said
'What will you do with it?'
'Dumb cat,' he cried,
And ran on. — Henry N. Beard

Uses are always much broader than functions, and usually far less contentious. The word function carries overtones of purpose andpropriety, of concern with why something was developed rather than with how it has actually been found useful. The function of automobiles is to transport people and objects, but they are used for a variety of other purposes
as homes, offices, bedrooms, henhouses, jetties, breakwaters, even offensive weapons. — Frank Smith

During the 1920s the market for automobiles changed slowly and subtly. Henry Ford's slogan for the Model T - "It takes you there and brings you back" - epitomized the original attraction of the car as a mode of basic transportation. In 1921, more than half of all cars sold in the United States were Fords. But — Andrew S. Grove

I learned a great lesson early on, even before I was really an actor, from that movie 'Planes, Trains & Automobiles' that John Hughes made: that you could make a movie that's really, really, really, really funny, and sometimes you can still achieve ... making the audience feel very deep emotions as well. — Joel Edgerton

The fact is that automobiles no longer have a place in the big cities of our time. — Bertrand Delanoe

Less than 10% of the fuel energy burned in automobiles is translated into forward motion of the vehicle and even then most of this energy is needed to move the vehicle itself, which typically weighs 20 times more than its passengers. — David Suzuki

In spite of being happier than I ever dreamed I could be, I'm also soberer. The fear that something may happen to you rests like a shadow on my heart. Always before I could be frivolous and carefree and unconcerned, because I had nothing precious to lose. But now
I shall have a Great Big Worry all the rest of my life. Whenever you are away from me I shall be thinking of all the automobiles that can run over you, or the signboards that can fall on your head or the dreadful, squirmy germs that you may be swallowing. — Jean Webster

America means far more than a continent bounded by two oceans. It is more than pride of military power, glory in war, or in victory. It means more than vast expanse of farms, of great factories or mines, magnificent cities, or millions of automobiles and radios. — Herbert Hoover

MANY DOGS RUN WILD IN THE CITY.
SOME ARE ABANDONED BY THEIR OWNERS
AND OTHERS ARE BORN TO LOST DOGS.
STRAYS HAVE A LIMITED LIFE EXPECTANCY
EVEN WHEN THEY BAND TOGETHER IN PACKS.
THEY ARE PREY TO DISEASE, PARASITES,
WEATHER AND AUTOMOBILES.
THEY TEND TO BE FRIGHTENED AND VICIOUS.
THEY ARE UNABLE TO PROTECT THEMSELVES
OR ANYONE ELSE. — Jenny Holzer

Many of us take better care of our automobiles than we do our own bodies ... yet the auto has replaceable parts. — B. J. Palmer

The truth is that we have hitherto made no genuine effort to produce forged steel working parts of automobiles of the highest quality. That is one of the reasons why our automobiles have not ranked with those of foreign make. — Charles M. Schwab

The bells on the streetcars ring, buses clatter by honking their horns, stuffed full with people and more people; taxis and fancy private automobiles hum over the glassy asphalt," he wrote. "The fragrance of heavy perfume floats by. Harlots smile from the artful pastels of fashionable women's faces; so-called men stroll to and fro, monocles glinting; fake and precious stones sparkle." Berlin was, he wrote, a "stone desert" filled with sin and corruption and inhabited by a populace "borne to the grave with a smile. — Erik Larson

One of the most important features of our economic resources is their scarcity: land, labor, and capital goods factors are all scarce, and may all be put to various possible uses. The free market uses them 'productively' because the producers are guided, on the market, to produce what the consumers most need: automobiles, for example, rather than buggies. — Murray Rothbard

The 'lords of the earth' are those who are doing their Will. It does not necessarily mean people with coronets and automobiles; there are plenty of such people who are the most sorrowful slaves in the world. The sole test of one's lordship is to know what one's true Will is, and to do it. — Aleister Crowley

Food tastes better 2. My skin has a sheen and radiance to it 3. I sleep better 4. Sex is better 5. I don't get winded as easily 6. My sense of smell has improved one hundred fold 7. My concentration is better 8. My heart rate is normal 9. My blood pressure is normal 10. My clothes don't stink 11. My hair and skin doesn't stink 12. My eyes are clearer and less bloodshot 13. My automobiles don't smell 14. My bank account is healthier 15. I exercise more 16. I drink less alcohol 17. My stress levels are more manageable 18. I work longer and harder 19. My blood work and screening is much better 20. My appetite is much better 21. My hands and feet don't get as cold in the winter 22. My overall wellness and health is much better — James Tower

One of our needs in a very complex society, where we encounter more people every day than probably our ancestors encountered over their whole lifetime, is our need to very rapidly evaluate other people. And one of the most potent ways of doing that is through our automobiles. So, a car isn't just a thing. It's a set of symbols and associations that we have to figure out in order to understand how we navigate our social worlds with that car. — Paul Solman

Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced. Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year - and therefore did. — Archibald MacLeish

People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue. — Hermann Hesse

Beautiful machines from 1920s and '30s, when automobiles were both monstrous and sexy at the same time. — Neal Shusterman

He bolted right through the wooden cross arm at the parking garage exit and power-slid into traffic. A torrent of car horns and skids enveloped his vehicle, but the tears in Danny's eyes created the inability to differentiate one vehicle from another. The colors of the automobiles bled into each other like melting rainbow sherbet. — Rick Mayhew

It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness, of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment ... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world. — Sinclair Lewis

An evening up on the Empire State roof-the strangest experience. The huge tomb in steel and glass, the ride to the 84th floor and there, under the clouds, a Hawaiian string quartet, lounge, concessions and, a thousand feet below, New York-a garden of golden lights winking on and off, automobiles, trucks winding in and out, and not a sound. All as silent as a dead city-and it looks adagio down there. — Dawn Powell

Of course, now that we've made the glorious Fourth safe by banning fireworks," he said, "people take to the highways in droves and kill each other with their automobiles. I suppose I should take you down to the shore today but frankly I'm afraid to. I wouldn't drive anywhere for all the tea in China — Keith Robertson

People can't stay out of their cars. I do think we have a real problem staying out of our automobiles. We have a real dependency on them, and it may be for more than just transportation. — Steve Forbert

I was not intrigued with the accouterments of success and fame, the furs, jewels, expensive automobiles and mansions ... I can assure you that these things were not on my mind when I sat spellbound in that Pozzuoli movie house. It was what these performers on the screen were doing, not what they received for doing it. — Sophia Loren

The Jeep windshield was doing its damnedest to stay clear, but the amount of water flowing over it threatened to overwhelm the ionizer. — Julian May

Fiction writers come up with some interesting metaphors when speaking of plot. Some say the plot is the highway and the characters are the automobiles. Others talk about stories that are "plot-driven," as if the plot were neither the highway nor the automobile, but the chauffeur. Others seem to have plot phobia and say they never plot. Still others turn up their noses at the very notion, as if there's something artificial, fraudulent, contrived. — James N. Frey

We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath...a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. — F. T. Marinetti

Through its prohibition on birth control, the Church has suggested that the only right way to have children is through biological reproduction: a kind of forced labor culminating in the production of another soul for God. What kind of a God stands like Lee Iacocca at the end of an assembly line, driving his workers with a greedy 'More! More!' while the automobiles pile up in showrooms and on freeways and in used-car lots and finally junkyards, his only satisfaction the gross production figures at the end of every quarter? — Nancy Mairs