Bicycle Quotes
Quotes from: Writers | Racers | Entertainers | Activists | Scientists |
"Get a bicycle. You will certainly not regret it if you live." - Mark Twain
"When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking." - Arthur Conan Doyle
“Like a bicycle, like a wheel that, once rolling, is stable only so long as it keeps moving but falls when its momentum stops, so the game between a man and woman, once begun, can exist only so long as it progresses. If the forward movement today is no more than it was yesterday, the game is over.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsen, Cancer Ward
"Newspapers are unable, seemingly to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization" - George Bernard Shaw
"Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I have hope for the human race." - H.G. Wells
"I still feel that variable gears are only for people over forty-five. Isn't it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailleur? We are getting soft. Come on, fellows. Let's say that the test was a fine demonstration--for our grandparents! As for me, give me a fixed gear!" - Henri Desgrange after a derailleur equipped bike rider beat a rider using a fixed gear
Henri Desgrange
"Their legs, like giant levers, will power onwards... their muscles will grind up the kilometers, their broad chests will heave with the effort of the struggle, their hands will cling to their handlebars; with their eyes they will observe each other ferociously; their backs will bend forward in unison for barbaric breakaways; their stomachs will fight against hunger, their brains against sleep. And at night a peasant waiting for them by a deserted road will see four demons passing by, and the noise of their desperate panting will freeze his heart and fill it with terror." - Henri Desgrange, quoted by Les Woodland in Tour de France: The Inside Story
"It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle." - Ernest Hemingway
"The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind." - William Saroyan
"To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?" - Angela Carter
"Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the attempt to avoid physical exertion. Now a group of backward-thinking atavists mounted on foot-powered pairs of Hula-Hoops would have us pumping our legs, gritting our teeth, and searing our lungs as though we were being chased across the Pleistocene savanna by saber-toothed tigers. Think of the hopes, the dreams, the effort, the brilliance, the pure force of will that, over the eons, has gone into the creation of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Bicycle riders would have us throw all this on the ash heap of history." - P.J. O'Rourke
"I will get there first, or they will find my body on the road" - James Moore
"It would be dangerous to follow Ottavio Bottecchia up a mountain pass. It would be suicidal. His climbing is so powerful and regular that we would end up asphyxiated". - Nicolas Frantz, winner of the 1927 and 1928 Tours de France
"Coppi? Is he the one we followed in the Giro del Piemonte? The guy who is as skinny as an asparagus? He doesn't lack courage, I'll give you that, but I think he's kind of fragile." - Gino Bartali
"Age and treachery will overcome youth and skill." - Fausto Coppi
"There are no races. Only lotteries." - Jacques Anquetil
Jacques Anquetil
"That's thirteen more than I need." - Jacques Anquetil after finishing the 1964 Tour de France Puy de Dôme stage with a fourteen-second lead.
"To prepare for a race there is nothing better than a good pheasant, some champagne and a woman" - Jacques Anquetil (whose training rides were actually so hard teammates avoided training with him)
"There's a terrible delight in watching a rival sink without a trace." - Bernard Hinault
"It’s a bollocks this race! You’re working like an animal, you don’t have time to piss, you wet your pants. You’re riding in mud like this, you’re slipping, it’s a piece of shit…" - Theo de Rooy on Paris-Roubaix. When asked if he would ever ride it again, de Rooy’s face transformed. "Ride it again?" he asked. "Of course I will. This is the most beautiful race in the world." - Paraphrased from Les Woodland's Paris-Roubaix: The Inside Story.
"If you brake, you don't win" - Mario Cipollini
"Refrain from throwing your bicycle in public. It shows poor upbringing" -Jacquie Phelan
"As a kid I had a dream - I wanted to own my own bicycle. When I got the bike I must have been the happiest boy in Liverpool, maybe the world. I lived for that bike. Most kids left their bike in the backyard at night. Not me. I insisted on taking mine indoors and the first night I even kept it in my bed." - John Lennon
"Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel...the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood." - Susan B. Anthony
"The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community." - Ann Strong, quoted in the Minneapolis Tribune, 1895
"A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." - Gloria Steinem or Irene Dunn
"Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to cycle and he will realize fishing is stupid and boring." - Desmond Tutu
"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving" - Albert Einstein