It never gets easier, you just go faster.
Greg LeMond
How I ache, I can hardly move. It was the longest hour of my career. It was terrible; you have no idea what an intense effort it is until you have done it. The record demands total effort, permanent and intense. I will never try it again. - The words of Eddy Merckx when he did finally manage to speak several minutes after setting a new Hour record in Mexico, 1972.
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 derailer? We are getting soft... As for me, give me a fixed gear!"
William Debois... no sorry it was Henri Desgrange
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, Minneapolis Tribune, 1895
Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live. - Mark Twain
The bicycle is a curious vehicle. Its passenger is its engine. - John Howard
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart. - Iris Murdoch
When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for man's convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man's brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others. Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle. - Elizabeth West
When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. - H.G. Wells
When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day's sensations: bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay's call, ice melting and so on. This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamorings of work, leave all the mind theaters behind and focus on nature instead. I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity. But I am mentally far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else's heart. - Diane Ackerman
The bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon. - Bill Strickland
A bicycle does get you there and more.... And there is always the thin edge of danger to keep you alert and comfortably apprehensive. Dogs become dogs again and snap at your raincoat; potholes become personal. And getting there is all the fun. - Bill Emerson
The bicycle will accomplish more for women's sensible dress than all the reform movements that have ever been waged. - Author Unknown, from Demerarest's Family Magazine, 1895
Until mountain biking came along, the bike scene was ruled by a small elite cadre of people who seemed allergic to enthusiasm. - Jacquie Phelan (Ouch)
The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard. - Sloan Wilson
Messengers and mountain bikers share a common chromosome. - James Bethea
If we all, mountain bikers, cyclists, multinational companies, Jo Public, respected the land like old civilizations we wouldn't get so many punctures. Earth's revenge. - Jo Burt
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
Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride. - John F. Kennedy
Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia. - H.G. Wells
It is curious that with the advent of the automobile and the airplane, the bicycle is still with us. Perhaps people like the world they can see from a bike, or the air they breathe when they're out on a bike. Or they like the bicycle's simplicity and the precision with which it is made. Or because they like the feeling of being able to hurtle through air one minute, and saunter through a park the next, without leaving behind clouds of choking exhaust, without leaving behind so much as a footstep. - Gurdon S. Leete
The sound of a car door opening in front of you is similar to the sound of a gun being cocked. - Amy Webster
Bicycling is the nearest approximation I know to the flight of birds. The airplane simply carries a man on its back like an obedient Pegasus; it gives him no wings of his own. - Louis J. Helle, Jr.
This was not a glamorous sport. It was not an immediately welcoming sport either. As I was getting ready, a short middle-aged man limped over to inform me that, 'We don't like newcomers here.' It was like Deliverance on wheels. - Michael Hutchinson on his first time-trial.
You never have the wind with you - either it is against you or you're having a good day. - Daniel Behrman
It would not be at all strange if history came to the conclusion that the perfection of the bicycle was the greatest incident of the nineteenth century. - Author Unknown
The secret to mountain biking is pretty simple. The slower you go the more likely it is you'll crash. - Julie Furtado (How true)
All bicycles weigh fifty pounds. A thirty-pound bicycle needs a twenty-pound lock. A forty-pound bicycle needs a ten-pound lock. A fifty-pound bicycle doesn't need a lock. - Author Unknown
Think of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world. - Grant Petersen
Socialism can only arrive by bicycle. - José Antonio Viera Gallo, (Chilean politician)
Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things. - William Golding
