Roads and automobiles - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

[Automobiles] contained the seeds of their own destruction. Seventy million steel juggernauts, operated by imperfect human beings at high speeds, are more destructive than war.

- Robert A. Heinlein, ''The Roads Must Roll'' (1940)

Even in the gloom and despite all windings of the road he knew whither he wished to go, and he did not falter, as long as there was a path that led towards his goal.

- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

A road that has once been opened cannot be closed again merely by passing a resolution.

- Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the Stars (1956)

Low-slung trucks with feeble headlights (useful only for warning purposes) sped mindlessly past them. [. . .] Economic corpuscles in an artery of Man, the behemoths charged heedlessly past the two monks who dodged them from lane to lane.

- Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

There are no wrong roads to anywhere.

- Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961)

''God, how I hate Feet,'' he muttered, looking down at his shrunken legs. ''Wheels forever!'' he softly cheered.

- Fritz Leiber, ''X Marks the Pedwalk'' (1963)

Like a white worm devouring the world, the road thrummed on, uncaring.

- Kenneth Bulmer, ''Station HR972'' (1967)

The roads, the roads were engineered beautifully. It was the stupid bastard people who were engineered wrong.

- Avram Davidson, ''The Roads, the Roads, the Beautiful Roads'' (1969)

In the world of the freeway, there was no place for a walking man.

- Harlan Ellison, ''Along the Scenic Route'' (1969)

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 conglomeration of specialized farming and manufacturing. It will breed rootlessness and immorality. It will make every man a tyrant.

- R. A. Lafferty, ''Interurban Queen'' (1970)

A man in an automobile is worth a thousand men on foot!

- R. A. Lafferty, ''Interurban Queen'' (1970)

I dream that as I traveled the splintered skeleton of our once-proud nation I came upon that mythic and dearly loved statistic, the pile of shattered automobiles that stretches into the clouds, from Detroit beyond the moon. [. . .] The automobiles stood like the solitary headstone in the planetwide cemetery of our race, and of all the living things that we had doomed along with ourselves.

- George Alec Effinger, ''Wednesday, November 15, 1967'' (1971)

Strange roads have strange guides.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (1972)

Along the northbound motorway embankment the sluggish traffic moved like blood in a dying artery.

- J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

Beyond eden, obscured but not inaudible, was the freeway - a roaring, melting glacier fed by tributary streets.

- Raylyn Moore, ''Trigononomy'' (1973)

All roads lead to the same end. So it's not so much which road you take, as how you take it.

- Charles De Lint, Greenmantle (1988)

People who plan roads, bridges, sewers, and so forth are called civil engineers. Civilization happens in cities, where civil society is possible, because of civil engineers. Cities are fed by roads, drained by sewers, watered by pipes that they lay down. There have been barbarian poets and composers, even painters and some lawyers, but never a barbarian civil engineer. You have to be civilized to care about roads.

- John Barnes, ''My Advice to the Civilized'' (1990)

There is a story among truckers that some roads capture a driver: land, concrete, and sky going on forever.

- Kathryn Kristine Rusch, ''HeadingWest'' (1990)

After driving 2295 all day, Karen decided that the larger the Texas highway number, the smaller and meaner the road.

- Leah Cutter, ''The Red Boots'' (2000)