‘It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.’

Ernest Hemingway

‘Think of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world.’

Grant Petersen

‘When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.’

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

‘After your first day of cycling, one dream is inevitable. A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow.’

H.G. Wells

‘The bicycle is the most civilised conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.’

Iris Murdoch

‘It’s amazing how I’m able to ride around on a bike. People kind of see it’s me, but since I’m on a bike, they think, “No, it’s not her”. And by the time they realise it’s me, I’m already gone’.

Beyonce Knowles

‘When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race’.

HG Wells

‘I thought of that [the theory of relativity] while riding my bike’.

Albert Einstein

‘The future’s all yours, you lousy bicycle’.

Butch Cassidy, 1969 film

‘It’s the stuff of dreams… As a child, being a fan of the sport, I never imagined that one day I’d be in this position. Kids from Kilburn don’t become favourite for the Tour de France. You’re supposed to become a postman or a milkman or work in Ladbrokes’.

Bradley Wiggins, Tour de France winner 2012

‘Nothing compares with the simple pleasure of a bike ride’.

JFK

‘As a kid I had a dream – I wanted to own my own bicycle. When I got the bike I must have been the happiest boy in Liverpool, maybe the world. I lived for that bike’.

John Lennon

‘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 a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance… the moment she takes her seat, she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle... away she goes, the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood’.

Susan B. Anthony, US crusader for women’s suffrage (1820—1906)