Quotations about Driving

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams. ~Mary Ellen Kelly


Patience is something you admire in the driver behind you and scorn in the one ahead. ~Mac McCleary


A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after. ~Peter De Vries


The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," 1841


It takes 8,460 bolts to assemble an automobile, and one nut to scatter it all over the road. ~Author Unknown


The best car safety device is a rear-view mirror with a cop in it. ~Dudley Moore


A pedestrian is someone who thought there were a couple of gallons left in the tank. ~Author Unknown


Leave sooner, drive slower, live longer. ~Author Unknown


It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours. ~Greenpeace advertisement, New York Times, 25 February 1990


Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race. ~H.G. Wells


Your grandchildren will likely find it incredible - or even sinful - that you burned up a gallon of gasoline to fetch a pack of cigarettes! ~Dr. Paul MacCready, Jr.


A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man. ~Arnold Toynbee


Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. ~Albert Einstein


I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol. ~Author Unknown


Hug your kids at home, but belt them in the car. ~Author Unknown


A tree never hits an automobile except in self defense. ~American Proverb


Americans are broad-minded people. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater, and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there is something wrong with him. ~Art Buchwald, "How Un-American Can You Get?," Have I Ever Lied to You?, 1966


Modern technology
Owes ecology
An apology.
~Alan M. Eddison


Never drive faster than your guardian angel can fly. ~Author Unknown


When buying a used car, punch the buttons on the radio. If all the stations are rock and roll, there's a good chance the transmission is shot. ~Larry Lujack


The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man. ~Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media


Car sickness is the feeling you get when the monthly payment is due. ~Author Unknown


The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above average drivers. ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"


The longest journey begins with a single step, not with a turn of the ignition key. ~Edward Abbey


Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities. ~Lewis Mumford



I hooked up my accelerator pedal in my car to my brake lights. I hit the gas, people behind me stop, and I'm gone. ~Steven Wright


The car has become a secular sanctuary for the individual, his shrine to the self, his mobile Walden Pond. ~Edward McDonagh


A commuter tie-up consists of you - and people who for some reason won't use public transit. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive. ~Author Unknown


Consider the man on horseback, and I have been a man on horseback for most of my life. Well, mostly he is a good man, but there is a change in him as soon as he mounts. Every man on horseback is an arrogant man, however gentle he may be on foot. The man in the automobile is one thousand times as dangerous. I tell you, it will engender absolute selfishness in mankind if the driving of automobiles becomes common. It will breed violence on a scale never seen before. It will mark the end of the family as we know it, the three or four generations living happily in one home. It will destroy the sense of neighborhood and the true sense of Nation. It will create giantized cankers of cities, false opulence of suburbs, ruinized countryside, and unhealthy conglomerations of specialized farming and manufacturing. It will make every man a tyrant. ~R.A. Lafferty, "Interurban Queen," 1970, a short story set in the late 1800s (Thanks, Sam!)


Automobiles are not ferocious.... it is man who is to be feared. ~Robbins B. Stoeckel


No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means. ~Garrett Hardin, The Ecologist, February 1974


Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf. ~Lewis Mumford


The shortest distance between two points is under construction. ~Noelie Altito


Road rage is the expression of the amateur sociopath in all of us, cured by running into a professional. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Driving a brand new car feels like driving around in an open billfold with the dollars flapping by your ears as they fly out the window. ~Grey Livingston


A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works. ~Bill Vaughan


Each year it seems to take less time to fly across the ocean and longer to drive to work. ~Author Unknown


If everything comes your way, you are in the wrong lane. ~Author Unknown


Anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac. ~Author Unknown


The elderly don't drive that badly; they're just the only ones with time to do the speed limit. ~Jason Love


Making a left turn in L.A. is one of the harder things you're going to learn in life. ~Lawrence Kasdan and Meg Kasdan, (movie), spoken by the character Mack


What fools indeed we morals are
To lavish care upon a Car,
With ne'er a bit of time to see
About our own machinery!
~John Kendrick Bangs


I represent what is left of a vanishing race, and that is the pedestrian.... That I am still able to be here, I owe to a keen eye and a nimble pair of legs. But I know they'll get me someday. ~Will Rogers


Recklessness is a species of crime and should be so regarded on our streets and highways. ~Marlen E. Pew


Stupidity is not a handicap. Park elsewhere! ~Author unknown, as seen on a shirt


Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car. ~E.B. White, One Man's Meat, 1943


The greater part of my official time is spent on investigating collisions between propelled vehicles, each on its own side of the road, each sounding its horn, and each stationary. ~An English Lord Chief Justice, quoted in 2,715 One-Line Quotations for Speakers, Writers & Raconteurs by Edward F. Murphy


Life is too short for traffic. ~Dan Bellack


For every "Drive Safely" sign, shouldn't there be a "Resume Normal Driving" sign? ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Another way to solve the traffic problems of this country is to pass a law that only paid-for cars be allowed to use the highways. ~Will Rogers


What a lucky thing the wheel was invented before the automobile; otherwise can you imagine the awful screeching? ~Samuel Hoffenstein


Take most people, they're crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they're always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that's even newer. I don't even like old cars. I mean they don't even interest me. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake. ~J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye


If all the cars in the United States were placed end to end, it would probably be Labor Day Weekend. ~Doug Larson


No other man-made device since the shields and lances of the knights quite fulfills a man's ego like an automobile. ~William Rootes


Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do. ~Jason Love


Road sense is the offspring of courtesy and the parent of safety. ~Australian Traffic Rule, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren


The automobile is technologically more sophisticated than the bundling board, but the human motives in their uses are sometimes the same. ~Charles M. Allen


The car has become... an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete. ~Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964


And I, I took the road less traveled by. I was using a GPS system. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


It finally happened. I got the GPS lady so confused, she said, "In one-quarter mile, make a legal stop and ask directions." ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Walking isn't a lost art - one must, by some means, get to the garage. ~Evan Esar


The speedway ends at the cemetery. ~Author Unknown


We are not proving ourselves spiritually worthy of our material progress. We have not been neighborly, courteous, and kind upon the highway. Our lack of decency toward our fellow men is a definite black mark against us. ~Cary T. Grayson


On the other hand, the Bible contains much that is relevant today, like Noah taking 40 days to find a place to park. ~Curtis McDougall


The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the living tissue of the city. Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable; moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving the buildings as mere islands of habitable space in a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic. ~James Marston Fitch, New York Times, 1 May 1960


Remember folks, street lights timed for 35 mph are also timed for 70 mph. ~Jim Samuels


I'm not sure... about automobiles.... With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization - that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can't have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that... the spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree... that automobiles 'had no business to be invented.' ~Eugene, from Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, 1918


Remember the street car cannot turn out. ~Charles M. Hayes


I feel like I am diagonally parked in a parallel universe. ~Author Unknown


You can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamn contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbrush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you'll see something, maybe. ~Edward Abbey