Combustion Engine Quotes & Sayings

It is arguable whether the human race have been gainers by the march of science beyond the steam engine. Electricity opens a field of infinite conveniences to ever greater numbers, but they may well have to pay dearly for them. But anyhow in my thought I stop short of the internal combustion engine which has made the world so much smaller. Still more must we fear the consequences of entrusting a human race so little different from their predecessors of the so-called barbarous ages such awful agencies as the atomic bomb. Give me the horse. — Winston Churchill

Faerie: where it's only a little weird to realize that my boyfriend is older than the internal combustion engine. — Seanan McGuire

It is a mistake," he said, " to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century. Once it was well known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer, the obvious remedy was to stop smoking, but the desired remedy was a cigarette that did not cause cancer. When it became clear that the internal-combustion engine was polluting the atmosphere dangerously, the obvious remedy was to abandon such engines, and the desired remedy was to develop non-polluting engines. — Isaac Asimov

I know that the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation. If he sees suffering, privation or injustice he must not allow it to move him, for that would be evidence of the lack of proper education or of absence of self-control. He must speak in calm and objective accents and talk about a dying child in the same way as he would about the pieces inside an internal combustion engine. — Aneurin Bevan

It's so easy to demagogue the issue and make someone who speaks out against the internal-combustion engine sound like an insane communist, when the truth is that the internal-combustion engine is the biggest threat to our lives, in terms of what it's doing to our environment and how it's depleting the ozone layer and so forth. — Bill Maher

A society sufficiently sophisticated to produce the internal combustion engine has not had the sophistication to develop cheap and efficient public transport?'
'Yes, boss... it's true. There's hardly any buses, the trains are hopelessly underfunded, and hence the entire population is stuck in traffic — Ben Elton

Think about it, Lee - we already know that intelligent minds produce finely tuned devices. Look at the space shuttle. Look at a television set. Look at an internal combustion engine. We see minds producing complex, precision machinery all the time.

So the existence of a supermind - or God - as the explanation for the fine - tuning of the universe makes all sense in the world. — Lee Strobel

The internal combustion engine, one of the greatest technological advancements in history, has an unfortunate downside, namely air pollution so thick that, very soon, sixty-four packs of crayons will include the color Sky Brown — Cuthbert Soup

To many of us now, computers, silicon chips, data processing, cybernetics, and all the other innovations of the dawning high technology age are as mystifying as the workings of the combustion engine must have been when that first Model T rattled down Main Street, U.S.A. But as surely as America's pioneer spirit made us the industrial giant of the 20th century, the same pioneer spirit today is opening up on another vast front of opportunity, the frontier of high technology. — Ronald Reagan

If the numbers mean anything, they tell us that vastly more life is left in the reviled internal-combustion engine than any of the blue-state lefties could imagine. First, that madman Bush wins, and now this news. How depressing. — Brock Yates

While greenies and their media flunkies continue to savage the gasoline-powered internal-combustion engine and rhapsodize about hybrids, hydrogen, electrics, natural gas, propane, nuclear, and God-knows-what-other panaceas, perhaps including bovine urine, there are no realistic, economically viable alternatives. None. Zero. Like it or not, as long as we remain dependent on the private automobile for transportation (roughly 80 percent of all movement in the nation is by car), we are harnessed to the IC gas engine. — Brock Yates

[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty? — Mark Steyn

A combustion engine of ambition and disappointment. — Tina Fey

It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five-year period. — Al Gore

There was a study done in the early 20th century of all the entrepreneurs who entered the automobile industry around the same time as Henry Ford; there were something like 500 automotive companies that got funded, had the internal combustion engine, had the technology, and had the vision. Sixty percent of them folded within a couple of years. — Eric Ries

The idea of gas engines was by no means new, but this was the first time that a really serious effort had been made to put them on the market. They were received with interest rather than enthusiasm and I do not recall any one who thought that the internal combustion engine could ever have more than a limited use. All the wise people demonstrated conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never thought that it might carve out a career for itself. That is the way with wise people
they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work. — Henry Ford

The advent of ebooks is no more going to kill the pleasure of reading than the introduction of the internal combustion engine made horses extinct. — Michael A. Stackpole

[R]epetition is as an essential element of language learning as a knife is to a lathe or fuel is to an internal combustion engine. — Kato Lomb

Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress, etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I'm helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don't. Yet I go around forming sentences. — Jonathan Lethem

Everybody thinks an automobile needs an engine. Well, an automobile doesn't necessarily need an engine. What we do is shift electric motors into the wheels of our automobiles and so we have a completely different kind of thing where we have four independent intelligent wheels rather than a traditional internal combustion engine and power train and so on. — William J. Mitchell

Andrus turned the engine and gave her a suspicious look. "You smell like ... " He shifted into drive. "What?" "Nothing, but - did something happen inside?" Could he really smell ... that? He crinkled his nose. "Your face is red and your scent is ... " Oh, God. He can! Kill me now! Giant bomb, falling tree, spontaneous combustion ... anything! — Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

Fear is like the steam that fires the combustion engine. You need fear to get a performance going. — Rachel Weisz

Within a decade, the internal combustion engine automobile is likely to look exactly like what it is - a machine that converts gasoline into much more heat than forward motion, a bizarre antiquity. — Stephen Petranek

For the first time there was constructed with this machine [locomotive engine] a self-acting mechanism in which the interplay of forces took shape transparently enough to discern the connection between the heat generated and the motion produced. The great puzzle of the vital force was also immediately solved for the physiologist in that it became evident that it is more than a mere poetic comparison when one conceives of the coal as the food of the locomotive and the combustion as the basis for its life. — Carl Ludwig

Wiping grime from his hands, Nick contemplated one of the world's great mysteries: why man had ever combined computers and the internal combustion engine. — Robin Kaye

The substitution of the internal combustion engine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind. — Winston Churchill

I hung a picture of him above my bed and learned by hand the internal workings of the female combustion engine. — Shannon Celebi

Electromagnetic theory and experiment gave us the telephone, radio, TV, computers, and made the internal combustion engine practical - thus, the car and airplane, leading inevitably to the rocket and outer-space exploration. — Gregory Benford

Holding back technology to reserve business models is like allowing blacksmiths to veto the internal combustion engine in order to protect their horseshoes. — Don Tapscott

So many of man's inventions - the syringe, the sword, the pen, the gun - were metaphorical cocks, but the internal combustion engine had to have been dreamt up by a man who had looked upon the human heart. — Joe Hill

The cars haven't advanced that much since we were kids. When you boil it down, it's still a gas combustion engine. — Dana Brunetti

I believe fuel cells will finally end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine ... Fuel cells could be the predominant automotive power source in 25 years. — Bill Ford

I believe fuel cells could end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine. — William Clay Ford Jr.

A steady recognition that the evils which prevent the fullness of moral development are precisely the elements which are also the source of the power that gives existence to whatever moral accomplishments we see about us may eventually lead us to a tolerance we grant to the internal-combustion engine: it is noisy and smelly, and occasionally, it refuses to start, but it is what gets us to wherever we get.
We must somehow learn to understand and so to tolerate- not destroy- the free society. — Michael Polanyi

Possibly the tragedy of the bicycle is that it was invented too close in time to the car. In the historical scheme, pedal power hardly got under way before the combustion engine appeared and, not only took over the roads, but changed our view of machines. We've forgotten that pedal power is a potent form of energy. — Richard Ballantine

I think the internal combustion engine will disappear from the streets of our cities in the next thirty years because transportation will be mass transportation, or probably electrical power. — Gaylord Nelson