Top 82 Quotes About Railroads
#1. Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease.
Karel Capek
#3. What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset.
Andrew Young
#4. She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought- and never worried about it again.
Ayn Rand
#5. I would speculate that a critical mass of the population has to internalize a middle class outlook first. International aid experience has demonstrated many times that just building railroads doesn't get you there. You need people ready to sue them.
Charles R. Morris
#6. Hog butcher for the world, Tool maker, stacker of wheat, Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of big shoulders.
Carl Sandburg
#7. The railroads once were a dominant power in American life, for good and for ill. There's something inevitably nostalgic about a train book today. Trains attract us, but part of that attraction is cultural memory.
Brian Floca
#8. Oh, the Irish were building the railroads down through Mexico, through Chihuahua. They finished the railroads when they finished out in the West Coast, and they went down and put the trains into Mexico.
Anthony Quinn
#9. I am not one of those who believe - broadly speaking - that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislatures, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.
Jane Addams
#10. Semi-automatic weapons are not just about gun control, they're about national security. You know that these weapons can shoot down airplanes, they can blow up railroads. This is really a whole national security issue.
Jesse Jackson
#11. On its most basic level, imperialism was all about building railroads.
Robert Gaudi
#12. Republican Robert La Follette of Wisconsin had defied the machine to become governor by waging war on the railroads that ruled his state.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#13. And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is romance and big things and real dreams that never go smash.
Carl Sandburg
#14. Dreams then were to be expressed in building railroads and factories, in boring gas wells, stringing telegraph poles. There was room for no other dream and since father could not do any of these things he was an outlaw in his community. The community tolerated him. His own sons tolerated him.
Sherwood Anderson
#15. The railroads are not run for the benefit of the dear public. That cry is nonsense. They are built for men who invest their money and expect to get a fair percentage of the same.
William Henry Vanderbilt
#16. In the end, the railroads made America and nanotech will make the 21st century, and that is the end of the story. The beginning of the story and the end of the story.
Felix Dennis
#17. If Ayn Rand were an up-and-coming author today, she wouldn't write about steel or railroads, it would be Net Neutrality.
Mark Cuban
#18. Shall the railroads govern the country, or shall the people govern the railroads? Shall the interest of railroad kings be chieflyregarded, or shall the interest of the people be paramount?
Rutherford B. Hayes
#19. Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.
Paul A. Samuelson
#20. These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves
they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#21. There is no legislation
I care not what it is
tariff, railroads, corporations, or of a general political character, that all equals in importance the putting of our banking and currency system on the sound basis proposed in the National Monetary Commission plan.
William Howard Taft
#22. The world admires wealth and velocity - these are the things for which everyone strives. Railroads, the post, steamboats, and all possible modes of communication are the means by which the world overeducates itself and freezes itself in mediocrity.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goeth
#23. I always lived by railroads, and I would find places to just look at the horizon, and I always expected there was something somewhere else. And sometimes I think that's more a metaphysical somewhere else rather than just to get out of the town.
Jason Molina
#24. Railroads are the primary economic beneficiaries. It's a difficult project for the public sector.
John Gates
#25. What opened up the American West was the fact that you owned the real estate. You owned the gold mines, the oil wells. The creation of these, back then, million dollar industries drove the railroads and eventually the airlines to provide this kind of transportation.
Peter Diamandis
#26. At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies - cotton - was America's primary export.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#27. I'll give you an example. Henry, the old black guy who cooks the corn bread, he worked on the railroads for about 20 years so he knows how to lay and build track.
Marc Singer
#28. In the railroads, some people read clearly printed departure signs and then proceed to ask several times what they say. On airplanes, they demand things they know they cannot have. In their cars, they load up, drive away and then suddenly realize they don't know where they're going.
Lucinda Franks
#29. If we'd had government on [today's] scale in the 1840s, the stagecoaches would have hired lobbyists to get a bill passed that railroads could not travel faster than a horse because it would be an unfair competitive advantage.
Newt Gingrich
#30. The bell of public opinion is today making the Morgan-Rockefeller-Vanderbilt class jump. Nor are the strongest of our corporations immune. The railroads have had to jump pretty lively, and certain gigantic industrial combinations are also being put through their paces.
B.C. Forbes
#31. War has become our national industry, like automotives and steel and the railroads once were.
Patricia Cornwell
#32. One of the things the government can't do is run anything. The only things our government runs are the post office and the railroads, and both of them are bankrupt.
Lee Iacocca
#33. Wind has the potential to produce many, many more jobs per kilowatt hour than coal. But the coal industry has tremendous political clout on Capitol Hill because of its alliance with the railroads and coal-burning utilities.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#34. If there were a major earthquake in Los Angeles, with bridges and highways and railroads and airports all shut down and huge buildings collapsing, I don't care how much planning you do, the first 72 hours is going to be chaotic.
Warren Rudman
#35. We've seen those results in generations of Muslim immigrants - farmers and factory workers, helping to lay the railroads and build our cities, the Muslim innovators who helped build some of our highest skyscrapers and who helped unlock the secrets of our universe.
Barack Obama
#37. The Negro people of America ... have cut our forests, tilled our fields, built our railroads, fought our battles, and in all of their trials they have manifested a simple faith, a grateful heart, a cheerful spirit, and an undivided loyalty .
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#38. Children and dogs are as necessary to the welfare of the country as Wall Street and the railroads.
Harry S. Truman
#39. Railroads brought about lasting social effects, as well. The companies' ruthless attention to keeping time impelled passengers to carry pocket watches,* and led to the eventual establishment of time zones.
Simon Winchester
#40. Yet, in 1850 nearly all the railroads in the United States lay east of the Mississippi River, and all of them, even when they were physically mere extensions of one another, were separately owned and separately managed.
John Moody
#41. The communications industry has been tremendously successful, but we need to build the railroads and the oil wells and the gold mines of space.
Peter Diamandis
#42. Increasing values again brought increasing values. As with the canals and turnpikes, it was transportation, this time the railroads, that was the focus of the speculation. Here the horizons seemed truly without limit. Who could lose on what was so obviously needed?
John Kenneth Galbraith
#43. The system of transportation is not coherent; it is not treated as integral. Roads compete with with railroads and airlines in chaotic fashion, and at immense cost to the nation.
Anthony Stafford Beer
#44. If we are indeed nostalgic for the weight of clock time, it is worth remembering that the standardized time that most of us know has only been around since the mid-nineteenth century. It was invented for the railroads.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#45. Like the railroads that brought us together in the 19th century, these trails will bring us together in the 20th and 21st centuries. (at launch of the National Millennium Trails Program, 1999)
Hillary Clinton
#46. The close relationship between railroad expansion and the genera development and prosperity of the country is nowhere brought more distinctly into relief than in connection with the construction of the Pacific railroads.
John Moody
#47. Heaven knows what I have not been through with, since I saw you-dust, dirt, dyspepsia, hotels, railroads, prairies, tobacco juice.
Julia Ward Howe
#48. People who haven't ridden in trains don't know what they're missing. It's not like an airplane. You get to see the countryside, the beautiful country we live in. Unfortunately, our railroads have dwindled in passenger traffic.
Ken Kelly
#49. What the railroads lack is not opportunity but some of the managerial imaginativeness and audacity that made them great.
Harvard Business School Press
#50. We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of nations would be an abstract of the common conscience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#51. It is useless to deny, and impossible to conceal, that a great part of Europe, the whole of Italy and France, and a great portion of Germany, to say nothing of other countries - is covered with a network of these secret societies, just as the superfices of the Earth are being covered with railroads.
Benjamin Disraeli
#52. Electricity is doing for the distribution of energy what the railroads have done for the distribution of materials.
Charles Proteus Steinmetz
#53. I shed many a tear when the steam engines went out of style on the railroads. I'd like to seem them come back, but I realize the diesels are more efficient.
Clyde Tombaugh
#54. History does not provide any example of capital accumulation brought about by a government. As far as governments invested in the construction of roads, railroads, and other useful public works, the capital needed was provided by the savings of individual citizens and borrowed by the government.
Ludwig Von Mises
#55. The peoples of the old world have their cities built for times gone by, when railroads and gunpowder were unknown. We can have cities for the new age that has come, adopted to its better conditions of use and ornament. We want, therefore, a city planning profession ...
Horace Bushnell
#56. The rage for railroads is so great that many will be laid in parts where they will not pay.
George Stephenson
#57. Railroads have eaten up all the capital and covered Russia like spiderwebs, so that perhaps in another fifteen years or so one may even be able to take a ride somewhere. Bridges burn only rarely, while towns burn down regularly, in established order, by turns, during the fire seasons.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#58. Whether it's steamships disrupted by the railroads or railroads disrupted by the airlines, it's typically the large entrenched incumbents that are displaced by innovators.
Peter Diamandis
#59. From its founding, [Nevada] has always struggled to belong. It has had a series of masters
the mining industry, the railroads, the federal government, and now gaming and tourism
that have driven the state's economy and compelled its direction.
Hal Rothman
#60. Some of history's cleverest business minds understood the power of share platforms, from the aggressive titans who made fortunes building the nation's railroads, to Conrad Hilton, who created the first premier brand of international hotels.
Lisa Gansky
#61. Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning ... proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
Carl Sandburg
#62. I don't care a damn for their guns, or you either, sir! What I want is the Southside Railroad!
Philip Sheridan
#63. Canadian Railroad Trilogy is an extremely fine piece of songwriting.
Johnny Cash
#64. I was the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad.
Harriet Tubman
#65. There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#67. Harriet Tubman fought American slavery single handed and was a pioneer in that organized effort known as the Underground Railroad.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#68. When my friends and I played cowboys and Indians, I was always the Chinese railroad worker.
Robin Williams
#69. The only free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the Vigilant Committee. They have tunneled under the whole breadth of the land.
Henry David Thoreau
#70. 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
#71. The best practice is to follow the advice posted on every railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen.
Sam Keen
#72. When I was a little kid, I used to walk miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of railroad tracks.
Pam Houston
#73. The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day.
Henry David Thoreau
#74. We seem to be committing ourselves to an eye wateringly expensive railroad for the few. High speed rail plan is madness.
Mike Rutherford
#75. Benefit of clergy: Half-rate on the railroad.
Mark Twain
#76. When I did big things, some large corporations like the Pennsylvania Railroad Company were behind me and responsible party.
Andrew Carnegie
#77. Give me snuff, whiskey, and Swedes, and I will build a railroad to hell.
James J. Hill
#78. RAILROAD, n. The chief of many mechanical devices enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off. For this purpose the railroad is held in highest favor by the optimist, for it permits him to make the transit with great expedition.
Ambrose Bierce
#79. A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
Christopher Morley
#80. A railroad is like a lie you have to keep building it to make it stand.
Mark Twain
#81. In the United States 'First' and 'Second' class can't be painted on railroad cars, for all passengers, being Americans, are equal and it would be 'unAmerican.' But paint 'Pullman' on a car and everyone is satisfied.
Owen Wister
#82. The true pioneer of civilization is not the newspaper, not religion, not the railroad - but whiskey!
Mark Twain
