Quotes & Sayings About Horsepower

We're far from having too much horsepower ... my definition of too much horsepower is when all four wheels are spinning in every gear. — Mark Donohue

I think all good actors are personalities. If they're not, they're not stars. What makes you a star is horsepower. — Katharine Hepburn

Others need more physical horsepower. Some need very little of either. — David Allen

Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool. — P. J. O'Rourke

An average horse can produce only about half a horsepower for any extended period. — David E. Nye

And this was how it started: Nose up to the light. Meet the driver's eyes. Shut off the air-co to give the car a few extra horsepower. Rev the engine. Smile like danger. — Maggie Stiefvater

Writing is like riding a bike. Once you gain momentum, the hills are easier. Editing, however, requires a motor and some horsepower. — Gina McKnight

Well, at first the band were simply called Horsepower, but a lot of people thought that was something to do with heroin. That really pissed me off, so I decided to put something in front of it to distract them. I got '16' from a traditional American folk song, where a man is singing about his dead wife and 16 black horses are pulling her casket up to the cemetery. I liked the image of 16 working horses. — David Eugene Edwards

When I first came to Washington, what I admired most was that people were just really, really smart with a tremendous amount of intellectual horsepower and the ability to look at an issue and say something fresh. — Ezra Klein

If you can leave two black stripes from the exit of one corner to the braking zone of the next, you have enough horsepower. — Mark Donohue

Life is 440 horsepower in a 2-cylinder engine. — Henry Miller

There, gleaming in the glow, was that ten-horsepower rotary engine under a seat. A key glistening in the ignition. I imagine the top speed for that old mower was five miles per hour. It might have taken an hour and a half or more for me to get to the liquor store, but get there I did. — George Jones

All horsepower corrupts. — Patrick Leigh Fermor

Pg. 231-232: They'd given me a minivan. They could have picked any car and they picked a minivan. A minivan. O God of the Vehicular Justice, why dost thou mock me? Minivan, you albatross around my neck! You mark of Cain! You wretched beast high ceilings and few horsepower! — John Green

I was born with a lot of horsepower. There was a lot cooking inside me, a lot of energy, and Dad was a strong man by will and by intelligence, and the combination of us was almost bound to result in periodic explosions. He and I disagreed politically, very violently, and things would get hectic around the house. — Richard Boone

The Korean War has also show quite clearly that in a major conflict manpower is as important as horsepower. — Aly Khan

In this place a mind was at work to negate the image of a free and intact man. It intended to rely on man power in the same way that it had relied on horsepower. It wanted units to be equal and divisable, and for that purpose man had to be destroyed as the horse had already been destroyed. — Ernst Junger

Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "Woo the muse of the odd." You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don't hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Don't become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. — Bruce Sterling

I love horsepower. — Carroll Shelby

Heart power is stronger than horsepower. — Henry J. Heinz

Competence means keeping your head in a crisis, sticking with a task even when it seems hopeless, and improvising good solutions to tough problems when every second counts. It encompasses ingenuity, determination and being prepared for anything.
Astronauts have these qualities not because we're smarter than everyone else (though let's face it, you do need a certain amount of intellectual horsepower to be able to fix a toilet). It's because we are taught to view the world - and ourselves - differently. My shorthand for it is "thinking like an astronaut." But you don't have to go to space to learn to do that.
It's mostly a matter of changing your perspective. — Chris Hadfield

There is never enough horsepower ... just not enough traction. — Carroll Shelby

Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder no just the bodies of humans but the body of Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

To do justice to modern technology's rigid linear structure, to the lofty gridwork of cranes and bridges, to the dynamism of machines operating at one thousand horsepower - only photography is capable of that. What those who are attached to the painterly style regard as photography's defect, the mechanical reproduction of form - is just what makes it superior to all other means of expression. — Albert Renger-Patzsch

Hey," Shane said from the other side of the bars. "Trade you cigarettes for a chocolate bar."
Funny," Eve said. She was almost back to her old unGothed self again, though there were still red splotches on her cheeks and around her eyes. "How come you're always behind bars, troublemaker?"
Look who's talking. I didn't try to outrun the cops in a hearse."
That hearse had horsepower." Eve got that moony look in her eyes again. "I love that hearse. — Rachel Caine

Could you boil tea if you just stirred it hard enough? No. The first problem is power. The amount of power in question, 700 watts, is about a horsepower, so if you want to boil tea in two minutes, you'll need at least one horse to stir it hard enough. — Randall Munroe

in order to get to the next level of whatever you're doing, you must think and act in a wildly different way than you previously have been. You cannot get to the next phase of a project without a grander mind-set, more acceleration, and extra horsepower. — Grant Cardone

They'd given me a minivan. They could have picked any car, and they picked a minivan. A minivan. O God of Vehicular Justice, why dost thou mock me? Minivan, you albatross around my neck! You mark of Cain! You wretched beast of high ceilings and few horsepower! — John Green

Guys want a 500 horsepower car. I'd rather have one horsepower - in a horse. That's macho. You go to pick up your date and you show up on a horse. — Bryan Callen

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

Now that she's at one with herself and the world she can work my brain over with high horsepower energy. — Jim Harrison

Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way. — Cynthia Ozick

Horsepower sells cars, torque wins races — Carroll Shelby

My senses of space, of distance, and of direction entirely vanished. When I looked for the ground I sometimes looked down, sometimes up, sometimes left, sometimes right. I thought I was very high up when I would suddenly be thown to earth in a near vertical spin. I thought I was very low to the ground and I was pulled up to 3,000 feet in two minutes by the 500-horsepower motor. It danced, it pushed, it tossed ... Ah! la la! — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

a huddle of robot sheep bleating their terror with mechanical lungs of a hundred horsepower. — Sinclair Lewis

This was the Mecca of the American Dream, the world that everyone wanted. A world of sleek young women (allied with Slenderella to be so) in shorts and halters, driving 400-horsepower station wagons to air-conditioned, music-serenaded supermarkets of baby-sitter corporations and culture condensed into Great Books discussion groups. A life of barbecues by the swimming pool and drive in movies open all year. It did't appeal to me. Fuck health insurance plans and life insurance. They wanted to live without leaving the womb. It made me more alive to play a game without rules against society, and I was prepared to play it to the end. A tremor almost sexual passed through me as I anticipated the comming robbery. — Edward Bunker

Two-hundred forty horsepower isn't enough to move me anymore. Enough to move my body, yes, but not my soul. — Albie Sachs

Consider this a one-thousand horsepower divorce, sweetheart — Daven Anderson

Everybody has a gas-guzzling car because people like SUVs. They would like SUVs if they were hybrid vehicles that had the same horsepower and used less gasoline. Instead, what the auto manufacturers are doing is building SUVs that are hybrid vehicles that use the same amount of gasoline because they up the horsepower. That's a decision that they make to market irresponsible economic behavior. The American people like the SUVs, they have kids, they, they need them, they get around in them, but we have options. — William J. Clinton

I don't design cars. I'm not a designer. I know what I desire to be built, I know what the end result is, the horsepower, the competition we'll be working against - but I leave it to the people who work with me to put it all together. I don't do anything. — Carroll Shelby

Horsepower sells motorcars and torque wins motor races. — Carroll Smith

All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there. I can't see it, because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle. I can't jump because the bit forbids it, and my own basic force - my horsepower, if you like - is too little. — Peter Shaffer

When the afterburner lights, I haven't got 5,000 horsepower. I've got 10,000 horsepower, and possibly the biggest accident you've ever seen in your life. — Richard Hammond

Heart power is better than horsepower. — Henry John Heinz

There are over 2 million cars standing in front of red lights with their engines going. Then we have over 2 million times approximately 100 horsepower being generated as they are idling there, so that we have something like 200 million horses jumping up and down and going nowhere. Now, we have to count that in our economy when we begin to get down to what is the efficiency of the economy. — R. Buckminster Fuller

I looked him up and down. Once before I'd seen Jericho Barrons wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It's like sheet-metaling a W16 Bugatti Veyron engine - all 1,001 horsepower of it - with the body of a '65 Shelby. The height of sophisticated power sporting in-your-face, fuck-you muscle. The effect is disturbing.
He had more tattoos now than he'd had a few days ago.when I'd last seen him wearing nothing but a sheen of sweat, his arms were unmarked. They were now sleeved in intricate crimson and black designs, from bicep to hand. A silver cuff gleamed in his wrist. There were chains on his boots.
"Slumming, huh?" I'd said
You should talk, said those dark eyes, as they swept my black leather ensemble. — Karen Marie Moning

The United States in the twenty-first century is not very much like nineteenth-century Prussia (Prussia today isn't much like Prussia then, either), but we still use its educational methods. We would never think of using its transportation methods (horsepower was literally horsepower), its communication methods (telegraphs), or its military technology (muzzle-loaders and bayonets). But government-run systems have a way of preserving themselves well past any rational point, which is why the United States still maintains the helium reserve it established for dirigible warfare - presumably to fight those nineteenth-century Prussians. — Kevin D. Williamson

Perhaps success is best defined as maximizing the ratio of your rear wheel horsepower to your engine horsepower. Higher %, happier times. — Tim Fargo