Bicycle Quotes (10 quotes)
…so slow is moral progress. True, we have the bicycle, the motor-car, the dirigible airship and other marvellous means of breaking our bones; but our morality is not one rung the higher for it all. One would even say that, the farther we proceed in our conquest of matter, the more our morality recedes. The most advanced of our inventions consists in bringing men down with grapeshot and explosives with the swiftness of the reaper mowing the corn.
I’m lazy. But it’s lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn’t like walking or carrying things.
Found in several sources, without citation, for example, in Quotable Quotes (1997), 92. If you know the prikmary source, please contact Webmaster.
Inventing is the intellectual bicycle that he rides each day.
Reported without quotation marks, describing James West, by Timothy L. O’Brien, in 'Not Invented here: Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge?', New York Times (13 Nov 2005), B6.
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
…...
Natural Science treats of motion and force. Many of its teachings remain as part of an educated man's permanent equipment in life.
Such are:
(a) The harder you shove a bicycle the faster it will go. This is because of natural science.
(b) If you fall from a high tower, you fall quicker and quicker and quicker; a judicious selection of a tower will ensure any rate of speed.(c) If you put your thumb in between two cogs it will go on and on, until the wheels are arrested, by your suspenders. This is machinery.
(d) Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one kind comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it.
Such are:
(a) The harder you shove a bicycle the faster it will go. This is because of natural science.
(b) If you fall from a high tower, you fall quicker and quicker and quicker; a judicious selection of a tower will ensure any rate of speed.
(d) Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one kind comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it.
In Literary Lapses (1918), 130.
Samuel Pierpoint Langley, at that time regarded as one of the most distinguished scientists in the United States … evidently believed that a full sized airplane could be built and flown largely from theory alone. This resulted in two successive disastrous plunges into the Potomac River, the second of which almost drowned his pilot. This experience contrasts with that of two bicycle mechanics Orville and Wilbur Wright who designed, built and flew the first successful airplane. But they did this after hundreds of experiments extending over a number of years.
In article Total Quality: Its Origins and its Future (1995), published at the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement.
The genius of Leonardo da Vinci imagined a flying machine, but it took the methodical application of science by those two American bicycle mechanics to create it.
In Time/CBS News, 'The Wright Brothers, People of the Century (1999), 42.
The swelling and towering omnibuses, the huge trucks and wagons and carriages, the impetuous hansoms and the more sobered four-wheelers, the pony-carts, donkey-carts, hand-carts, and bicycles which fearlessly find their way amidst the turmoil, with foot-passengers winding in and out, and covering the sidewalks with their multitude, give the effect of a single monstrous organism, which writhes swiftly along the channel where it had run in the figure of a flood till you were tired of that metaphor. You are now a molecule of that vast organism.
Describing streets in London, from 'London Films', Harper’s Magazine (), 110, No. 655, 72.
When I was a boy, I could cycle out of town and be in fields in ten minutes. I knew where the birds’ nests and badger setts were. Now children’s mothers would tell them they need someone to go with them, to make sure they weren’t molested by a sexual deviant.
Commenting on today’s increased anxiety with health and safety culture. As reported by Adam Lusher in 'Sir David Attenborough', Daily Mail (28 Feb 2014).
When I was about 13, I cycled from Leicester to the Lake District and back again, collecting fossils and staying in youth hostels. I was away for three weeks, and my mother and father didn’t know where I was. I doubt many parents would let children do that now.
It is about 200 miles each way between his hometown (Leicester) and the Lake District. As reported by Adam Lusher in 'Sir David Attenborough', Daily Mail (28 Feb 2014).