General Motors Quotes

My goal in coming to General Motors was to help restore profitability, build a strong market position and position this iconic company for success. We are clearly on that path.

General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary.

Sadly, at Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler sales continually trend downward, manufacturing costs rise, and employment declines. As the result of the decrease in the number of cars produced by American manufacturers, membership in the United Auto Workers has dropped from a high of over 1.5 million thirty years ago to less than half a million today.

It isn't easy for me to have contact with the industry, because it is so outdated. Look at General Motors, look at -Mercedes, look at Chrysler, look at Porsche, look at BMW . . . They are all building cars from yesterday! Nobody has an idea how the car of tomorrow should look. I've built them already. I have the prototypes in my exhibition, but they won't do it.

I don't hurt the industry. The industry hurts itself, by making so many lousy movies - as if General Motors deliberately put out a bad car.

Investing is the greatest business in the world because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate; the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! And nobody calls a strike on you. There's no penalty except opportunity. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then, when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.

I will never get married to the head of General Motors. I will never be the wife of a superstar. For those women, their lives are somebody else's. I will never be a Mrs. Blabidyblah!

Made by General Motors, on order from Sears Roebuck.

I don't think I would have to run a campaign that's financed like General Motors.

With my luck, if I ever invested in General Motors, they'd bust it to Corporal!

General Motors spends more on health care than steel

I hate to let people down. I was like that in sports and I was like that in comedy. I was like that at work. When I worked General Motors and stuff like that, when I say something, I mean it.

Well, as you know, General Motors does not make hybrids. Ford only made 4,000 hybrids last year.

The world is super-stupid. You have by far the best designers in America! And you do the most stupid cars in the world! They put billions into their stupid designs for General Motors, Chrysler, Buick, or who knows what. The designers in America must be frustrated. I am not frustrated, because I am not a designer - I am a philosopher, and all philosophers have said for ages that the world around them is stupid.

organizations like the church or General Motors promote a man up and up until he reaches a spot which he is obviously incapable of filling, and there they lay him to rest.

God is less careful than General Motors, for He floods the world with factory rejects.

Does the critic wish to influence the kind of film that costs more than £250,000? It is as if he were to send a postcard to General Motors explaining that he would like them to make a raft next year, or a helicopter, instead of a car.

Barack Obama's vision of America is one in which a President of the United States can fire the head of General Motors, tell banks how to bank, control the medical system and take charge of all sorts of other activities for which neither he nor other politicians have any expertise or experience.

Revitalizing General Motors is like teaching an elephant to tap dance. You find the sensitive spot and start poking.

Legalize racing in every State. Sure people will bet, but they get to see the horses run and you certain can't see General Motors and General Electric and General Utility run when you bet on them.

These are the multinationals, like General Motors and Nestle; these are the big industrial groups that weigh, on the monetary scale, much more than big countries like Egypt.

The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.

General Motors could buy Delaware if DuPont were willing to sell it.

And so we said to General Motors that the solution had to be a first year increase, which had to be sizeable because we bad to catch up with the lost position as against the cost of living and we had to make some progress.

There's only one movie theater in the entire city of Detroit. The entire city has one open movie theater, and it is in the - it is in the General Motors headquarters complex.

If General Motors is worth $60 a share to an investor it must be because the full common-stock ownership of this gigantic enterprise as a whole is worth 43 million (shares) times $60, or no less than $2,600 million.

In America, we need to go forward in nationalizing several large corporations: I think that's possible; we nationalized General Motors; we nationalized several of the big banks, de facto; we nationalized Chrysler; we nationalized AIG. I think there will be more crises, and at some point, rather than being bailed out by the government, the public may keep the corporations it has to rescue.

I have a consistent rule: The American people should know as much about the Pentagon as the Soviet Union and China do, as much about General Motors as Ford does, and as much about City Bank as Chase Manhattan does.

The white worker who has been displaced at General Motors has more in common with the displaced black worker than those larger white CEO's, and those Wall Street people who are determining their fate... whose thievery and greed is determining their fate.

If you gave me the choice of being CEO of General Electric or IBM or General Motors, you name it, or delivering papers, I would deliver papers. I would. I enjoyed doing that. I can think about what I want to think. I don't have to do anything I don't want to do.

We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

You want to know whether we're better off? I've got a little bumper sticker for you: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive! Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive!

What's good for America better damn well be good for General Motors.

Barack Obama likes to point to General Motors as the poster child for the job creation success of his economic policies. However, whatever your sentiments about the government's bailout of General Motors, for every job Barack Obama 'saved-or-created' in the U.S. there were two jobs off shore.

The power of branding, particularly when it comes to automobiles, is overwhelming. You go back to the seventies and eighties with the General Motor situation I was describing? Literally, folks, the Camaro and Firebird were identical cars but you'd so have the Firebird buyers, the Pontiacs, "No way I'm I buying that Camaro!" " It's the same car." "Nooooo, it is not. That is a Chevy and mine is a Pontiac."

" many seemingly independent businessmen or craftsman are more or less well paid retainers of larger corporations, such as the cobbler, operating a United States shoe machine or an automobile dealer holding a license of the General Motors Corporation."

If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won't go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed. Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course - the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

My dad was an assembly line worker at AC Spark Plug, which was a division of General Motors, and his job was to build and then inspect the little spark plugs as they came off the line.

My Dad sold automobiles as a general manager of a General Motors automobile dealership. He was a job creator. Everyone of those cars he sold he created a job for somebody on the assembly line.

General Motors, General Mills, General Foods, general ignorance, general apathy, and general cussedness elect presidents and Congressmen and maintain them in power.

...to make the world safe for democracy.

General Motors committed likewise to invest billions of dollars in its American manufacturing operation, keeping many jobs here that were going to leave. And if I didn't get elected, believe me, they would have left, and these jobs and these things that I am announcing would never have come here.

Wherefore the brain must be looked upon as the universal and general sensory and at the same time as the universal and general motory organ of the body and finally as the universal and general laboratory of the animal spirits and the blood or of the essential juices of life.

I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not? It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy, and Liberals at bay. And the nation free.

My mom was terrific. I described my mom once. If fear was a color, she was color blind. Nothing frightened her. If I told her that I was going to take over General Motors, she'd say, "You can do it." Just the most preposterous things, ambitious things, she said, "You can do it."

We're still promoting stupid wasteful behavior in agribusiness - everything from ethanol production for cars to genetically modified crops. In commerce just about everything we do politically is in the service of WalMart and the systems tied to it. In transportation, we could, for instance, have compelled General Motors to produce railroad rolling stock as a condition of their bail-out, but we didn't do that. Instead, we're chasing the phantom of electric cars - and, believe me, we are going to be mortally disappointed how that works out.

I might say that when the settlement was made the Nixon administration issued what they called a second inflation alert in which the General Motors settlement was branded as being inflationary and bad for the country.

When I was research head of General Motors and wanted a problem solved, I'd place a table outside the meeting room with a sign: "Leave slide rules here." If I didn't do that, I'd find someone reaching for his slide rule. Then he'd be on his feet saying, "Boss, you can't do it."

People are in denial all the time, hiding things. If I tell you a racist or dirty joke and you laugh, you're telling me something about yourself, which you don't want to reveal. Accessing that hidden side is what good acting is all about. And there are only a handful of people in the entire United States who interest me as actors, who surprise me. Even people who write about it, don't know anything about good performance. At least when you work at General Motors, you know something about cars.

Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.