Transcontinental Quotes & Sayings

It's nothing but a big stroke job in this country. The government strokes you every day of your life. Religion never stops stroking you. Big business gives you a good stroke. And it's one big, transcontinental, cross-country, red, white and blue stroke job ... Do you know what the national emblem for this country ought to be? Forget that bald eagle. The national emblem of this country ought to be Uncle Sam standing naked at attention saluting, and seated on a chair next to him, the Statue of Liberty jerking him off. That would be a good symbol for the United Strokes of America. — George Carlin

Even under more ingratiating conditions than rocket travel, this new conquest has already disclosed drawbacks quite as remarkable as its advantages. On a transcontinental flight by a jet plane approaching super-sonic speed, the actual trip is so cramped, so dull, so vacuous, that the only attraction the air lines dare to offer are those vulgar experiences one can have by walking to the nearest cabaret, restaurant, or cinema: liquor, food, motion pictures, luscious stewardesses. Only a lurking sense of fear and the possibility of a grisly death help restore the sense of reality. — Lewis Mumford

The shuttle tomorrow is truly like laying the last spike on the transcontinental railroad, only much more so. And whether or not we're going to see in in the next 10 or 20 years, there are people alive today who will see manufacturing in space from moon materials or from asteroids. — Jerry Brown

It is expensive to give plays subtitles, especially for a short run, so most new dramas rarely cross the transcontinental bridge. — Katori Hall

The fourth landing of the Columbia is the historical equivalent of the driving of the golden spike which completed the first transcontinental railroad. It marks our entrance into a new era. — Ronald Reagan

Who reads short stories? one is asked, and I like to think that they are read by men and women in the dentist's office, waiting to be called to the chair; they are read on transcontinental plane trips instead of watching banal and vulgar films spin out the time between our coasts; they are read by discerning and well-informed men and women who seem to feel that narrative fiction can contribute to our understanding of one another and the sometimes bewildering world around us. — John Cheever

Although I was the one cast out alone onto a transcontinental bus, home was running away from me — Ivan Doig

A workday lunch that lasts as long as a transcontinental flight is an impossibility for all but the most pliant and footloose of food tourists. To get in the game, you need a thick wallet, an adventurous palate, and a whole lot of time. — Graydon Carter

Keep a spur handy. — Meg Mims

It's hard to make something as large as a government change. It's a little bit like building the transcontinental railroad. — Tim O'Reilly

There was gray train smoke over the town most days, it smelled of travel, of transcontinental trains about to flash by, of important things about to happen. The train smell sounded the 'A' for Lamptown and then a treble chord of frying hamburger and onions and boiling coffee was struck by Hermann Bauer's kitchen, with a sostenuto of stale beer from Delaney's back door. These were all busy smells and seemed a 6 to 6 smell, a working town's smell, to be exchanged at the last factory whistle for the festival night odors of popcorn, Spearmint chewing gum, barber-shop pomades, and the faint smell of far-off damp cloverfields. Mornings the cloverfields retreated when the first Columbus local roared through the town. Bauer's coffee pot boiled over again, and the factory's night watchmen filed into Delaney's for their morning beer. — Dawn Powell

[The building of the transcontinental railway] was something truly earth-shaking and, whether or not there had been a dime in it for me, sooner or later I would have been out on the grade with my cameras. — William Henry Jackson

The Transcontinental Railroad Act is the first step in creating a continental common market. — Charles R. Morris

But that's part of what makes America wonderful, is we always had this nagging dissatisfaction that spurs us on. That's how we ended up going west, that's how we
"I'm tired of all these people back east; if I go west, there's going to be my own land and I'm not going to have to put up with this nonsense, and I'm going to start my own thing, and I've got my homestead." ... It is true, though, that that restlessness and that dissatisfaction which has helped us go to the moon and create the Internet and build the Transcontinental Railroad and build our land-grant colleges, that those things, born of dissatisfaction, we can very rapidly then take for granted and not tend to and not defend, and not understand how precious these things are. — Barack Obama

When I think about fashion and elegance, I imagine a woman from the 1950s, on an airplane, with seamed stockings and a garment belt underneath, a skirt, high heels, and her hair that she's done the night before, perfectly done eyeliner, lipstick, gloves, perhaps, and all this just to sit on an airplane for a transcontinental flight. — Liz Goldwyn

For an economy built to last we must invest in what will fuel us for generations to come. This is our history - from the Transcontinental Railroad to the Hoover Dam, to the dredging of our ports and building of our most historic bridges - our American ancestors prioritized growth and investment in our nation's infrastructure. — Cory Booker

The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network. — Eric S. Raymond

Did a few poor souls die because of the Big Dig? Son, a hundred men died building the Hoover Dam. A thousand men died building the Erie Canal. Four hundred Chinamen died building the transcontinental railroad. How about the Panama Canal? One of the greatest engineering feats in history? Thirty thousand men died building it. Ambitious projects always cost lives, son. That's the truth. Have you ever visited the great pyramids of Giza? — Joseph Finder

The plumbing and pluvial dynamics of the Amazon, the largest freshwater system on Earth, are still far from understood. This is partly because it is a semi-open system. Moisture flows in and out unpredictably. A lot of nonlinear feedback loops and 'remote influences' - continental, transcontinental, oceanic, meteorological - come into play. — Alex Shoumatoff

Are there any alternatives? Well, there is the hypothesis that this universe is not unique, but that all possible universes exist, and we find ourselves, not surprisingly, in one that contains life. But that is a cop-out, which dispenses with the attempt to explain anything. And without the hypothesis of multiple universes, the observation that if life hadn't come into existence we wouldn't be here has no significance. One doesn't show that something doesn't require explanation by pointing out that it is a condition of one's existence. If I ask for an explanation of the fact that the air pressure in the transcontinental jet is close to that at sea level, it is no answer to point out that if it weren't, I'd be dead. — Thomas Nagel