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The Great Quotations
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They waste natural resources, pollute the air and groundwater, desecrate the landscape with asphalt and last forever in landfills, but by God - we love them.
Mr. Goodwrench was right: it's not your car, it's your freedom, and freedom stirs the soul. There are plenty of writers who've disparaged the automobile, but here are some quotations from those who've seen something favorable in the invention of personal mobility. The automobile is a box that contains the beach, the mountains, your friends and the rest of the world. Let us retain that wonderful freedom while economizing today, and encouraging automotive design goals that preserve a world we'll want to drive in tomorrow.
 Everything in Life is somewhere else, and you can get there in a car.
E. B. White. “Fro-Joy”, One Man’s Meat, 1944.
Except for the American woman, nothing interests the eye of the American man more than an automobile, or seems so important to him as an object of aesthetic appreciation.
Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr., 1902 - ‘81, US art historian and first director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Automobiles are free of egotism, passion, prejudice and stupid ideas about where to have dinner. They are, literally, selfless. A world designed for automobiles instead of people would have wider streets, larger dining rooms, fewer stairs to climb and no smelly, dangerous subway stations.
P. J. O'Rourke (b. 1947), U.S. journalist. Give War a Chance, "An Argument in Favor of Automobiles vs Pedestrians" (1992).
No other man-made device since the shields and lances of the ancient knights fulfills a man's ego like an automobile.
Sir William (LATER LORD) ROOTES (1894-1964), British automobile manufacturer. Quoted in: "Who Said That?" 14 Jan. 1958, BBC-TV.
Anybody who doesn't cut his speed at the sight of a police car is probably parked.
Anonymous
Teach a child to be polite and courteous in the home, and, when he grows up, he will never be able to edge his car onto a freeway.
Anonymous
An artist who has traveled on a steam train, driven an automobile, or flown in an airplane doesn’t feel the same way about form and space as one who has not.
Stuart Davis, 1894-1964, ‘Is There a Revolution in the Arts?’ in Bulletin of America’s Town Meeting of the Air, vol. 5, no. 19, Feb. 19, 1940.
The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.
J. G. Ballard (b. 1930), British author. "The Car, The Future" (first published in Drive, (London, Autumn 1971; repr. in Re/Search, no. 8/9, San Francisco, 1984).
Glorious, stirring sight! The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today-in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped-always somebody else's horizons! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!
Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932), British essayist, writer of children's books. Toad, in The Wind in the Willows, ch. 2 (1908).
If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get one million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
Robert X Cringely.
That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.
Scientific American, June 2, 1909.
Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain-at least in a poor country like Russia-and his vanity begins to swell out like his tyres. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), Russian revolutionary. The History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 2, ch. 7 (1933).
A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), French author, filmmaker. Opium, (1929; tr. 1932; repr. 1957, p. 20). Cocteau added, "The craving for opium can be endured in a car."
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
Roland Barthes (1915-80), French semiologist. Mythologies, "The New Citroën" (1957; tr. 1972).
What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), British novelist. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3 (ed. by Anne O. Bell, 1980), entry for 21 Aug. 1927.
Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
Sir Fred Hoyle (b. 1915), British astronomer. Observer (London, 9 Sept. 1979)
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