The original plan had been to go for a cycle today, but snow showers and high winds stopped that. So instead I went to an exhibition called Dreams on Wheels in the Botanic Gardens.
There were some stylish looking cycles of interesting design there, including some where the gearing is internal, which would stop your chain getting clogged with mud. One in three Copenhagers cycle to work. There are 60,000 bicycles in Edinburgh, which is about one bicycle per eight people, and the bicycle seems to be loved and cherished in Denmark as it is not here.
I have often wished that a publisher would pay me to put together a book called The Bicycle Reader, celebrating the bicycle in literature and politics, but someone else had already done the research.
When I see an adult on a bicycle I do not despair for the future of the human race.
H G Wells
Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.
Susan B. Anthony 1896
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
The bicycle, the bicycle, surely should always be the vehicles of novelists and poets.
Christopher Morley
Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live.
Mark Twain, “Taming the Bicycle”
20 million km of paved road in the world.
40 thousand km of combined marked path/segregated or mixed use.
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, "The Quotable Cyclist"
I’ve found the quotation page over here.
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