User:CyclePat/Bicycle Quotes

Funny

• "Yes Brain, but if our knees bent the other way, how would we ride a bicycle?" from Pinky and the Brain

• "Three men riding on a bicycle which has only one wheel, I guess that's surrealist." ~ Dong Kingman in Twenty-two Famous Painters and Illustrators Tell How They Work (1964)

• When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord, in his wisdom, doesn't work that way. So I just stole one and asked him to forgive me. from Emo Philips.

• Alright, Striker, you listen, and listen close. Flying a plane is no different from riding a bicycle; it's just a lot harder to put baseball cards in the spokes. by Kramer from the movie Airplane!.

• (Most of the crew are asleep in their bunks) **Pilgrim: "I once met a girl who used me as a bicycle. It felt delicious!" **Schwalle: "You're greasy enough for sure!"

Business, Planing

• "The Tour (de France) is essentially a math problem, a 2,000-mile race over three weeks that's sometimes won by a margin of a minute or less. How do you propel yourself through space on a bicycle, sometimes steeply uphill, at a speed sustainable for three weeks? Every second counts." from Lance Armstrong.

• "If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward. In the first phase of the two-cycle innovation engine, you work furiously on some problem, inspired by your confidence that you'll be able to solve it. In the second phase, you look at what you've done in the cold light of morning, and see all its flaws very clearly. But as long as your critical spirit doesn't outweigh your hope, you'll be able to look at your admittedly incomplete system and think, how hard can it be to get the rest of the way?" from Paul Graham.

Biology, Nature, culture

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

• Again, there is the illusion of "increased command over Nature," meaning that cotton is cheap and that ten miles of country road on a bicycle have replaced four on foot. But even if man's increased command over Nature included any increased command over himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution into a higher being), the fact remains that it is only by running away from the increased command over Nature to country places where Nature is still in primitive command over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap cotton costs us. from George Bernard Shaw.

• In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. (The Devil) (Act 3)

Other

• When I started here all there was was lampshade warehouses and leather bars, the serious leather bars where you wouldn't get in unless you had a rubber ball stuffed in your mouth, the wine list was tattooed on the bartender's face. That kind of place. I remember one guy had a bicycle reflector sewn onto one nipple.

Leaving, Quiting, Dieing

• [Butch throws his bicycle away] The future's all yours, you lousy bicycles. There are a few other quotes from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

• "I want to die at a hundred years old with an American flag on my back and the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles per hour. I want to cross one last finish line as my stud wife and my ten children applaud, and then I want to lie down in a field of those famous French sunflowers and gracefully expire, the perfect contradiction to my once anticipated poignant early demise." From Lance Armstrong, (It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life).

• HAL's shutdown

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[HAL's shutdown]

HAL: I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.

Dave Bowman: Yes, I'd like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me.

HAL: It's called "Daisy."

[Sings while slowing down]

HAL: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.

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