Railroad Quotes: Journey through Inspirational Tracks

"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, Actor

"On the eighteenth of December 1972, when we thought we were getting another of the hundreds of little tactical air raids, we heard the bombs going in out there in the railroad yards and this went on for about thirty minutes"

James Stockdale, Soldier

"Incidentally, our railroad facilities are under video surveillance by the federal police. However, the federal and state governments will have to determine whether video surveillance shouldn't be significantly expanded to a certain degree"

Otto Schily, Public Servant

"Great men are usually the products of their times and one of the men developed by these times takes rank with the greatest railroad leaders in history"

John Moody, Businessman

"A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad"

Theodore Roosevelt, President

"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, Businessman

"I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger"

Harriet Tubman, Activist

"While no one railroad can completely duplicate another line, two or more may compete at particular points"

John Moody, Businessman

"The railroad originally was as completely dissociated from steam propulsion as was the ship"

John Moody, Businessman

"I went West and took part in the strike of the machinists - the Southern Pacific Railroad, the corporation that swung California by its golden tail, that controlled its legislature, its farmers, its preachers, its workers"

Mary Harris Jones, Activist

"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, Businessman

"The United States as we know it today is largely the result of mechanical inventions, and in particular of agricultural machinery and the railroad"

John Moody, Businessman

"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, Politician

"One of the points in which I was especially interested was the Jim Crow regulations, that is, the system of separation of the races in street cars and railroad trains"

Ray Stannard Baker, Journalist

"Consequently many large railroad systems of heavy capitalization bid fair to run into difficulties on the first serious falling off in general business"

John Moody, Businessman

"The history of the Erie Railroad ever since 1901 has been a record of progress"

John Moody, Businessman

"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, Businessman

"I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator"

Mary Harris Jones, Activist

"With the reorganization of 1898 finished, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad entered a new period in its history"

John Moody, Businessman

"When the scheme for the construction of a railroad from Baltimore to the waters of the Ohio River first began to take form, the United States had barely emerged from the Revolutionary period"

John Moody, Businessman

"The public conviction that a railroad linking the West and the East was an absolute necessity became so pronounced after the gold discoveries of '49 that Congress passed an act in 1853 providing for a survey of several lines from the Mississippi to the Pacific"

John Moody, Businessman

"Many of the railroad evils were inherent in the situation; they were explained by the fact that both managers and public were dealing with a new agency whose laws they did not completely understand"

John Moody, Businessman

"Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles"

Paul Samuelson, Economist

"I bought a railroad during this period of time"

Bill Janklow, Politician

"It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad"

David R. Brower, Environmentalist

"Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist - whatever"

Les Paul, Musician

"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, Actor

"Now, therefore, the Directors of the company are hereby ordered to see that precautions are taken to make travel on said railroad perfectly safe by using a screw with at least twenty-four inches diameter"

Joshua A. Norton, Celebrity

"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, Educator

"I was one man and I tackled a big railroad. I did the best I could"

O. Winston Link, Photographer

"If women can be railroad workers in Russia, why can't they fly in space?"

Valentina Tereshkova, Astronaut

"Now, people have said that somebody told them that they saw somebody on the railroad bank or saw somebody going over the bank, but no one has ever been able to show any cartridges, any rifle, any pistol, no one has ever found anything other than the evidence about Oswald"

John Sherman Cooper, Politician

"For 50 years my father worked for the railroad"

Harold Evans, Journalist

"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, Scientist

"I have always loved to sit in ferry and railroad stations and watch the people, to walk on crowded streets, just walk along among the people, and see their faces, to be among people on street cars and trains and boats"

Ella R. Bloor

"A private railroad car is not an acquired taste. One takes to it immediately"

Eleanor Robson Belmont, Actress

"My parents moved to Los Angeles when I was really young, but I spent every summer with my grandparents, and I'd stay with my grandfather on the farm in Longview. He was retired from the railroad, and he had a small farm with some cows and some pigs. I remember part of my youth was feeding hogs and plowing fields and stuff, so that's a part of me"

Forest Whitaker, Actor

"I know Mother named me after a railroad man, but it's too late now, I'm afraid. Much, much too late"

Hoagy Carmichael, Composer

"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, Writer

"Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station"

Ada Louise Huxtable, Critic

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