Quotations on Bicycling & Transportation
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"Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride"
~John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States
"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, writer (1919-1999)
"Every time I see
an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race."
~H.G.
Wells
"When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes
monotonous, when hope seems hardly worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out
for a good spin down the road, without thought of anything but the ride you are
taking."
~Arthur Conan Doyle
”The car has
become... an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and
incomplete.”
~Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964
”The automobile has
not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the living tissue of the
city. Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable; moving and parked, it
devours urban land, leaving the buildings as mere islands of habitable space in
a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic.”
~James Marston Fitch, New York Times,
1 May 1960
”The activist is
not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up
the river.”
~Ross Perot
”Our national
flower is the concrete cloverleaf.”
~Lewis Mumford
“Modern technology
Owes ecology
An apology.”
~Alan M. Eddison
”Your grandchildren
will likely find it incredible - or even sinful - that you burned up a gallon of
gasoline to fetch a pack of cigarettes!”
~Dr. Paul MacCready, Jr.
”You go into a
community and they will vote 80 percent to 20 percent in favor of a tougher
Clean Air Act, but if you ask them to devote 20 minutes a year to having their
car emissions inspected, they will vote 80 to 20 against it. We are a long way
in this country from taking individual responsibility for the environmental
problem.”
~William D. Ruckelshaus, former EPA administrator, New York Times,
30 November 1988
”A vigorous
five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than
all the medicine and psychology in the world.”
~Paul Dudley White
”Everywhere is
walking distance if you have the time.”
~Steven Wright
”I have two
doctors, my left leg and my right.”
~G.M. Trevelyan
”Natives who beat
drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow
horns to break up traffic jams.”
~Mary Ellen Kelly
”The civilized man
has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson,
"Self-Reliance," 1841
”It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours.” ~Greenpeace advertisement, New York Times, 25 February 1990
”There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs there'd be no place to put it all.” ~Robert Orben
”Don't blow it -
good planets are hard to find.”
~Quoted in Time
”Remember the
street car cannot turn out.”
~Charles M. Hayes
”Man is the animal
that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given
up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back
each day.”
~Bill Vaughan
”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
”Think of bicycles
as rideable art that can just about save the world.”
~Grant Peterson
”A city that
outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.”
~Arnold Toynbee
”Americans are broad-minded people. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater, and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there is something wrong with him.” ~Art Buchwald, "How Un-American Can You Get?," Have I Ever Lied to You?, 1966
”Automobiles are
not ferocious.... it is man who is to be feared.”
~Robbins B. Stoeckel
”In an
underdeveloped country, don't drink the water; in a developed country, don't
breathe the air.”
~Changing Times magazine
”Every day is Earth
Day.”
~Author Unknown
”Restore human legs
as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special
parking facilities.”
~Lewis Mumford
”Consider the man
on horseback, and I have been a man on horseback for most of my life. Well,
mostly he is a good man, but there is a change in him as soon as he mounts.
Every man on horseback is an arrogant man, however gentle he may be on foot.
The man in the automobile is one thousand times as dangerous. I tell you, it
will engender absolute selfishness in mankind if the driving of automobiles
becomes common. It will breed violence on a scale never seen before. It will
mark the end of the family as we know it, the three or four generations living
happily in one home. It will destroy the sense of neighborhood and the true
sense of Nation. It will create giantized cankers of cities, false opulence of
suburbs, ruinized countryside, and unhealthy conglomerations of specialized
farming and manufacturing. It will make every man a tyrant.”
~R.A. Lafferty (1914-2002), as quoted in Adbusters, Spring 1996 (ed:
attributed to Lafferty in the 19th century, but that was premature for him, and
almost the automobile.)
”One of the first
laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death
penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution for that offense is
recorded. But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution
became an appalling problem in England.”
~Glenn T. Seaborg, Atomic Energy
Commission chairman, speech, Argonne National Laboratory, 1969
”No one should be
able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.”
~Garrett Hardin, The
Ecologist, February 1974
”Everything in life
is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.”
~E.B. White, One Man's Meat,
1943
”Humanity is on the
march, earth itself is left behind.”
~David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of
Humanism, 1978
”As we watch the
sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters
of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some
future universal historian on another planet to say about us: "With all their
genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and
water and ideas," or, "They went on playing politics until their world collapsed
around them."
~U Thant, speech, 1970
”What fools indeed
we morals are
To lavish care upon a Car,
With ne'er a bit of time to see
About our own machinery!”
~John Kendrick Bangs
”Remember when
atmospheric contaminants were romantically called stardust?”
~Lane Olinghouse
”I'm not sure...
about automobiles.... With all their speed forward they may be a step backward
in civilization - that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will
not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls. I am not
sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life
than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going
to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and
they are going to alter peace. I think men's minds are going to be changed in
subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But
you can't have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some
inward ones, and it may be that... the spiritual alteration will be bad for us.
Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by
that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to
agree... that automobiles 'had no business to be invented.”
~Eugene, from Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, 1918
”You can't see
anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamn contraption and walk,
better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the
thornbrush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you'll
see something, maybe.”
~Edward Abbey
”Because we don't
think about future generations, they will never forget us.”
~Henrik Tikkanen
”For 200 years
we've been conquering Nature. Now we're beating it to death.”
~Tom McMillan,
quoted in Francesca Lyman, The Greenhouse Trap, 1990
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The International Bicycle Fund is an independent, non-profit organization. Its primary purpose is to promote bicycle transportation. Most IBF projects and activities fall into one of four categories: planning and engineering, safety education, economic development assistance and promoting international understanding. IBF's objective is to create a sustainable, people-friendly environment by creating opportunities of the highest practicable quality for bicycle transportation. IBF is funded by private donation. Contributions are always welcome and are U.S. tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
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