Quotes & Sayings About Motors

First, I thought Twitter was some kind of hybrid car being developed by Government Motors. Then I thought it was a new bite-size snack combining what's best of the Frito and the Cheeto. Then I found out it was me. On a laptop. At the U.S. Open. Having fun. — Dan Jenkins

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces. — Henry Adams

It is the instinctive wish of most American businesspeople, even those unlikely to be directly affected, that General Motors not go bankrupt. — Carol Loomis

The Obama administration asked General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner to step down, and he agreed. This is good news for Obama; the last time he tried to get someone to quit, it took months
and even then, he had to promise her a job as secretary of state ... According to the government, Rick Wagoner was forced to resign because of poor performance. That's embarrassing
run an organization that loses billions of dollars and then get fired by a guy who heads up an organization that loses trillions of dollars. — Jay Leno

So long as TARP money is wrapped up in GM, the company will never shake its 'Government Motors' image. That label, as competitors and GM employees are keenly aware, is code for one thing: 'GM is a failure.' — Edward Whitacre Jr.

For value investors, General Motors is a tempting target. The company's share of the North American auto market has steadily declined for two decades, and analysts say the company suffers from weak management and unexciting cars. — Alex Berenson

It's Obama's bad luck that he got elected just as the mayhem of the foreclosures, the banking collapse, and the General Motors disaster was accelerating the surge in unemployment to warp speed. — Tina Brown

Everybody recognizes that if you can make very efficient electric motors, you can make a quantum leap forward. — James Dyson

Barack Obama likes to point to General Motors as the poster child for the job creation success of his economic policies. However, whatever your sentiments about the government's bailout of General Motors, for every job Barack Obama 'saved-or-created' in the U.S. there were two jobs off shore. — Bob Beauprez

What's good for America better damn well be good for General Motors. — Barack Obama

If General Motors can't survive and run their business like a business, let them go under. — James Woods

Made by General Motors, on order from Sears Roebuck. — Richard Condon

Tata Motors decided to establish a car — Ashwin Sanghi

The internet has become one of the motors of the 21st century economy, allowing all of us to reach a global audience at a click of a mouse and creating hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of jobs. — Vint Cerf

Taking away coffee from Americans is like taking away oil from the motors. — M.F. Moonzajer

Our goal is to make General Motors the most valuable automotive company. Clearly, that is having sustainable profitability and driving great returns for our shareholders. — Mary Barra

Although the reasons for Michigan's malaise are varied, one big reason is our state's almost uniquely uncompetitive tax structure, which one General Motors official called the costliest of all jurisdictions where GM operates. — Mike Bouchard

An unfolding technology has increased our economic strength and added to the convenience of our lives. But that same technology-we know now-carries danger with it. From the great smoke stacks of industry and from the exhausts of motors and machines, 130 million tons of soot, carbon and grime settle over the people and shroud the Nation's cities each year. From towns, factories, and stockyards, wastes pollute our rivers and streams, endangering the waters we drink and use. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Have you seen these Japanese hospital droids, or humanoids, or whatever they call it? They've perfected the skin, and the skin looks so real. They have these motors between the eyes for when they smile. It's just mind-blowing. — Joel Kinnaman

If you gave me the choice of being CEO of General Electric or IBM or General Motors, you name it, or delivering papers, I would deliver papers. I would. I enjoyed doing that. I can think about what I want to think. I don't have to do anything I don't want to do. — Warren Buffett

Our expanding Canadian operations are concrete evidence of General Motors confidence in Canada. — Charles E. Wilson

The prairie towns no more exist to serve the farmers who are their reason of existence than do the great capitals; they exist to fatten on the farmers, to provide for the townsmen large motors and social preferment; and, unlike the capitals, they do not give to the district in return for usury a stately and permanent center , but only this ragged camp. It is a "parasitic Greek civilization"
minus the civilization. — Sinclair Lewis

Over the summer we chatted one night while Angie stripped a bed, changed wet sheets, comforted and repajamaed a toddler, and chased down a car of speeding teenagers while shaking a brick at them, never once interrupting the conversation or setting down her margarita. The only reason this woman isn't president of General Motors is because she's chosen not to be. — Jen Lancaster

In any case, if the reader would have a correct idea of the mood of these exiles, we must conjure up once more those dreary evenings, sifting down through a haze of dust and golden light upon the treeless streets filled with teeming crowds of men and women. For, characteristically, the sound that rose towards the terraces still bathed in the last glow of daylight, now that the noises of vehicles and motors
the sole voice of cities in ordinary times
had ceased, was but one vast rumour of low voices and incessant footfalls, the drumming of innumerable soles timed to the eerie whistling of the plague in the sultry air above, the sound of a huge concourse of people marking time, a never-ending, stifling drone that, gradually swelling, filled the town from end to end, and evening after evening gave its truest, mournfullest expression to the blind endurance which had ousted love from all our hearts. — Albert Camus

Do you know what the three most exciting sounds in the world are?
Anchor chains, airplane motors and train whistles. — George Bailey

General Motors, ITT, and Ford come most readily to mind as having plants protected by Hitler, — Mark Kurlansky

The motors I build there were exactly as I imagined them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely reproduced the pictures as they appeared to my vision and the operation was always as I expected. — Nikola Tesla

The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning. — John Kenneth Galbraith

I came from an environment where if you see a snake, you kill it. At General motors, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is to hire a consultant on snakes. — Ross Perot

I hate to let people down. I was like that in sports and I was like that in comedy. I was like that at work. When I worked General Motors and stuff like that, when I say something, I mean it. — Bernie Mac

I don't hurt the industry. The industry hurts itself, by making so many lousy movies - as if General Motors deliberately put out a bad car. — Humphrey Bogart

I will never get married to the head of General Motors. I will never be the wife of a superstar. For those women, their lives are somebody else's ... I will never be a 'Mrs. Blabidyblah!' — Stephanie Zimbalist

General Motors has no bad years, only good years and better years. — Harlow Curtice

Is anyone anywhere happy? No, not unless they are living in a dream or in an artifice that they or someone else has made. For a time I was lulled in the arms of a blind organism with breasts full of champagne and nipples made of caviar. I thought she was true, and that the true was the beautiful. But the true is the ugly mixed up everywhere, like a peck of dirt scattered through your life. The true is that there is no security, no artifice to stop the unsavory changes, the rat race, the death unwish - the winged chariot, the horns and the motors, the Devil in the clock. Love is a desperate artifice to take the place of those two original parents who turned out not to be omnisciently right gods, but a rather pedestrian pair of muddled suburbanites who, no matter how bumbling they tried, never could quite understand how or why you grew up to your 21st birthday. — Sylvia Plath

Motors make noise and that tells you about the feelings and attitudes that went into it. Something was more important than sensory pleasure - nobody would invent a chair or dish that smelled bad or that made horrible noises - why were motors invented noisy? How could they possibly be considered complete or successful inventions with this glaring defect? Unless, of course, the aggressive, hostile, assaultive sound actually served to express some impulse of the owner. — Philip Slater

Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things. — Nick Park

To lift farm drudgery off flesh and blood and lay it on steel and motors has been my most constant ambition — Henry Ford

As I have learned over the years, and will discuss further in subsequent chapters, the reluctance to experiment, test, evaluate, and learn that I experienced at General Motors is all too common. — Richard H. Thaler

Eberhard had come up with the name Tesla Motors, both to pay homage to the inventor and electric motor pioneer Nikola Tesla and because it sounded cool. — Ashlee Vance

Motors that are vulnerable to shorting out because of snow ingestion should have snow filters installed over air intakes, and spare motors should be ready to replace any failed motors. — Robert James Thomson

The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires - to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty ... He perceived that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected.
- chapter 8 — Sinclair Lewis

We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts. — Richard Prince

I have a consistent rule: The American people should know as much about the Pentagon as the Soviet Union and China do, as much about General Motors as Ford does, and as much about City Bank as Chase Manhattan does. — Ralph Nader

Does the critic wish to influence the kind of film that costs more than £250,000? It is as if he were to send a postcard to General Motors explaining that he would like them to make a raft next year, or a helicopter, instead of a car. — Kenneth Tynan

Their love of existence - chosen in the knowledge that nothing will be given, that one must make one's own desire and every shape of its fulfillment - through the steps of shaping metal, rails and motors - they had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one's enjoyment, that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal. — Ayn Rand

A city is half beast and half machine, with arteries of fresh water and veins of foul, nerves of telephone and electrical cables, sewer lines for bowels, pipes full of pressurized steam and others carrying gas, valves and fans and filters and meters and motors and transformers and tens of thousands of interlinked computers, and though its people sleep, the city never does. — Dean Koontz

... he was the most popular kid in school, and I was not. I sensed something in myself that made me feel disconnected from the cliques inhabited by my classmates. I knew if I put myself out there more, I could probably have just as wide a social circle as anyone else. But the overwhelming desire to be included and liked that operated the motors of most kids just wasn't in me. I was content to sit back and let the world come to me; if it did, great, and if not, well, that was okay too. — T.M. Goeglein

A magnificent fireworks began: magnesium flares blindingly white, yellow, and then red, like dying stars; straight bright red streaks of machine-gun fire; elegant and clear lines of bullets traced like fugitive neon light; and scarlet, sinister rugged patches from antiaircraft artillery. Then the noise: after the solemn, promising silence of the flares came the mad disorderly reaction of the inhabitants of the earth to the regular, obstinate sounds of the invisible motors in the sky.
The airplanes replied to the nervous coughing of the machine guns with great battering blows that shook the earth. It was a celebration in honor of death. — Albert Memmi

A mobile is an abstract sculpture made chiefly out of sheet metal, steel rods, wire and wood. Some or all of these elements move, propelled by electric motors, wind, water or by hand. — Alexander Calder

If you think about jeans or phones or television, we are used to new brands popping up right and left. But in the car industry, we grew up with Mercedes, BMW, General Motors, and Ford, and nobody can remember during his or her upbringing a new car brand coming to life. — Henrik Fisker

As Sharon types the letters, I stand hands in pockets looking through the gold lettering of our window. I think of Sharon and American Motors. It closed yesterday at 30 ¼. — Walker Percy

These are the multinationals, like General Motors and Nestle; these are the big industrial groups that weigh, on the monetary scale, much more than big countries like Egypt. — Ahmed Ben Bella

General Motors spends more on health care than steel. — Kathleen Sebelius

General Motors is alive and kicking today, it is because in 2009 President Obama's administration wrote off 90 percent of its debt. — Yanis Varoufakis

Out of her mouth came a stream of discrete, miraculous gadgets - tiny but mobile creatures so intricately small that generations marveled and would go on marveling at how the inventor ever got the motors into them. — Richard Powers

The film is therefore a form of science fiction, in which humans, beasts and machines are on the verge of extinction - 'sacred motors' linked together by a common fate and solidarity, slaves to an increasingly virtual world. A world from which visible machines, real experiences and actions are gradually disappearing. — Leos Carax

Articulate each meeting's purpose (Making an announcement? Delivering a report?). Terminate the meeting once the purpose is accomplished. Follow up with short communications summarizing the discussion, spelling out new work assignments and deadlines for completing them. General Motors CEO Alfred Sloan's legendary mastery of meeting follow-up helped secure GM's industry dominance in the mid-twentieth century. — Harvard Business School Press

General Motors, General Mills, General Foods, general ignorance, general apathy, and general cussedness elect presidents and Congressmen and maintain them in power. — Herbert M. Shelton

We just put General Motors in the hands of people who can't even run our own government. — Glenn Beck

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. — Elon Musk

But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn't do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative. — Thomas Keneally

And what's interesting about the hybrids taking off is you've now introduced electric motors to the automobile industry. It's the first radical change in automobile technology in 100 years. — Chris Anderson

If General Motors is worth $60 a share to an investor it must be because the full common-stock ownership of this gigantic enterprise as a whole is worth 43 million (shares) times $60, or no less than $2,600 million. — Benjamin Graham

The late Alfred P. Sloan, Ir., long-time executive of General Motors Corporation, had a fivepoint "secret of success." It was: 1. Get the facts. 2. Recognize the equities of all concerned. 3. Realize the necessity of doing a better job every day. 4. Keep an open mind. 5. Work hard. — Alfred P. Sloan

Most Web activities do not generate jobs and revenue at the rate of past technological breakthroughs. When Ford and General Motors were growing in the early part of the twentieth century, they created millions of jobs and helped build Detroit into a top-tier U.S. city. Today, Facebook creates a lot of voyeuristic pleasure, but the company doesn't employ many people and hasn't done much for Palo Alto; a lot of the "work" is performed more or less automatically by the software and the servers. You could say that the real work is done by its users, in their spare time and as a form of leisure. Web 2.0 is not filling government coffers or supporting many families, even though it's been great for users, programmers, and some information technology specialists. Everyone on the Web has heard of Twitter, but as of Fall 2010, only about three hundred people work there. — Tyler Cowen

When I was research head of General Motors and wanted a problem solved, I'd place a table outside the meeting room with a sign: "Leave slide rules here." If I didn't do that, I'd find someone reaching for his slide rule. Then he'd be on his feet saying, "Boss, you can't do it." — Charles Kettering

Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal? — Rachel Carson

I don't think I would have to run a campaign that's financed like General Motors. — John Bolton

Engineers at General Motors have developed a revolutionary new engine whose only function is to lubricate itself. — George Carlin

Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder's family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40% of the US population: 120 million people. — Tony Judt

My dad was an assembly line worker at AC Spark Plug, which was a division of General Motors, and his job was to build and then inspect the little spark plugs as they came off the line. — Michael Moore

Our thinking behind these agreements is that we want all jobs in General Motors to be good jobs. — Charles E. Wilson

I say, they [those at the top] don't have to conspire, because they all think alike. The president of General Motors and the president of Chase Manhattan Bank really are not going to disagree much on anything, nor would the editor of the New York Times disagree with them. They all tend to think quite alike, otherwise they would not be in those jobs. — Gore Vidal

Wilderness and motors are incompatible and the former can best be experienced, understood and enjoyed when the machines are left behind where they belong
on the superhighways and in the parking lots, on the reservoirs and in the marinas. — Edward Abbey

Our field is the sky,
tilled by the sweat of motors,
in the face of night,
at the risk of our dreams
... . ... ... ... ...
Who lived there? Whose hands were pure?
Who glowed in the night,
A ghost to other ghosts?
Who lives down below? Who cries ... .
Who has lost the key to their house?
Who can't find their bed, who is sleeping
on the steps of the stairs? When morning comes, who will
dare interpret the silvery trace: look above me ... When the
water pushes the watermill wheel once again,
who will dare remember the night? — Ingeborg Bachmann

One has the feeling of enormous safety. You don't have the torque from the propeller. You have no noise; it's almost like little electric motors humming inside, and you feel sort of safe. — Erich Warsitz

To make good decisions, CEOs need the courage to seek out disagreement. Alfred Sloan, the longtime CEO and chairman of General Motors, once interrupted a committee meeting with a question: "Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here?" All the committee members nodded. "Then," Sloan said, "I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what this decision is about. — Chip Heath

I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not? It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy, and Liberals at bay. And the nation free. — William F. Buckley Jr.

With my luck, if I ever invested in General Motors, they'd bust it to Corporal! — Robert Orben

You could transfer Congress over to run Standard Oil or General Motors, and they would have both things bankrupt in two years. — Will Rogers

How strange it was to be inside a machine again! All his life he'd been inside machines, whether he realised it or not. Modern houses were machines. Shopping centres were machines. Schools. Cars. Trains. Cities. They were all sophisticated technological constructs, wired up with lights and motors. You switched them on, and didn't spare them a thought while they pampered you with unnatural services. — Michel Faber

I might say that when the settlement was made the Nixon administration issued what they called a second inflation alert in which the General Motors settlement was branded as being inflationary and bad for the country. — Leonard Woodcock

God is less careful than General Motors, for He floods the world with factory rejects. — Mignon McLaughlin

How she moves. That's just like Jell-O on springs. She must have some sort of built-in motors. I tell you, it's a whole different sex! Joe: What are you afraid of? Nobody's asking you to have a baby. — Jack Lemmon

The violations of these diesel motors by our company go against everything that Volkswagen stands for ... at this time, I don't yet have the answers to all the questions. I'm utterly sorry that we have damaged trust in this way. I offer my deepest apologies to our customers, the authorities, and to the public at large for our misconduct. — Martin Winterkorn

Well, as you know, General Motors does not make hybrids. Ford only made 4,000 hybrids last year. — Ed Markey

You want to know whether we're better off? I've got a little bumper sticker for you: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive! Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive! — Joe Biden

And so we said to General Motors that the solution had to be a first year increase, which had to be sizeable because we had to catch up with the lost position as against the cost of living and we had to make some progress. — Leonard Woodcock

Revitalizing General Motors is like teaching an elephant to tap dance. You find the sensitive spot and start poking. — Ross Perot

In 1998 Gordon Hempton, a sound recordist attempting to build a library of natural sounds, toured fifteen states west of the Mississippi and found only two areas--in the mountains of Colorado and the Boundary Waters of Minnesota--that were free of motors, aircraft, industrial clamor, or gunfire for more than fifteen minutes during daylight. — Robyn Griggs Lawrence

There are two types of people-anchors and motors. You want to lose the anchors and get with the motors because the motors are going somewhere and they're having more fun. The anchors will just drag you down. — Robert Wyland

Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running. — Toni Morrison

What really went wrong is that General Motors has had this philosophy from the beginning that what's good for General Motors is good for the country. So, their attitude was, 'We'll build it and you buy it. We'll tell you what to buy. You just buy it.' — Michael Moore

If you've ever taken an economics course you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. I don't have to tell you, that's not what's done. If advertisers lived by market principles then some enterprise, say, General Motors, would put on a brief announcement of their products and their properties, along with comments by Consumer Reports magazine so you could make a judgment about it.

That's not what an ad for a car is - an ad for a car is a football hero, an actress, the car doing some crazy thing like going up a mountain or something. If you've ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices - that's what advertising is. — Noam Chomsky

Organizations like the church or General Motors promote a man up and up until he reaches a spot which he is obviously incapable of filling, and there they lay him to rest. — James A. Michener

For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. — Charles Erwin Wilson

I started at General Motors at 18 years old as a co-op student at the General Motors Institute, which is now Kettering. — Mary Barra

We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The president of General Motors was in a foul humor. — Arthur Hailey

No manufacturer, from General Motors to the Little Lulu Novelty Company, would think of putting a product on the market without benefit of a designer. — Raymond Loewy