The Word

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

–H. G. Wells

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, The Red and the Green

I still feel that variable gears are only for people over 45.
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!

–Henri Desgrange, Founder le Tour de France, L’Équipe article of 1902

If you ride you know those moments when you have fed yourself into the traffic, felt the hashed-up asphalt rattle in the handlebars, held a lungful of air in a cloud of exhaust. Up ahead there are two parallel buses. With cat’s whiskers, you measure the clearance down a doubtful alley. You swing wide, outflank that flower truck. The cross-street yellow light is turning red. You burst off the green like a surfer on a wave of metal. You have a hundred empty yards of Broadway to yourself.

–Chip Brown, “A Bike and a Prayer”

Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There’s something wrong with a society that drives a car to workout in a gym.

–Bill Nye, the Science Guy

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

–James Branch Cabell

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, Hovel in the Hills

Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.

–James E. Starrs

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, “On Bicycling,” Saturday Evening Post, 29 July 1967