Favorite Cycling/Transportation quotes?

[Tim Kelley]

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.” -Mark Twain

[vvill]

“My other bike is a bike.”

[KelOnWheels]

Aw, Tim Kelley got the one I was going to put.

“Handing over a bank-note is enough to make the bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

[ShawnoftheDread]

@KelOnWheels 31505 wrote:

Aw, Tim Kelley got the one I was going to put.

“Handing over a bank-note is enough to make the bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

Just ONE bank note?! Sartre obviously wasn’t ELITE.

[KelOnWheels]

@ShawnoftheDread 31514 wrote:

Just ONE bank note?! Sartre obviously wasn’t ELITE.

Trek financing. He got a Madone 7.

[Bilsko]

@KelOnWheels 31505 wrote:

Aw, Tim Kelley got the one I was going to put.

“Handing over a bank-note is enough to make the bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

True story:
When I was about 10-12 yrs old, my mother gave me a check to go pick up a new bike at the LBS. I had to ride through what I thought was a rough stretch of neighborhood and so – not really understanding the non-transferability characteristic of checks- I folded it up a bunch of times and stuffed it in my shoe to keep it from getting stolen. It only barely survived the ride to the bike shop and they gave it and me one look and [probably] laughed. I got it right the second time around. IIRC, it was a Trek 720, white with black-speckled paint.

Anyways, “bank-notes” -as they would have existed in J-P S’s time- made be remember that story.

[bikesnick]

“To possess a bicycle is to be able first to look at it, then to touch it. But touching is revealing as insufficient; what is necessary is to be able to get on the bicycle and take a ride. But this gratuitous ride is likewise insufficient; it would be necessary to use the bicycle to go on some errands. And this refers us to longer uses … But these trips themselves disintegrate into a thousand appropriative behavior patterns, each one of which refers to others. Finally, as one could foresee, handing over a bank note is enough to make a bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession.”
from Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre

[jnva]

“Be like water” -Bruce Lee

[Certifried]

“You’re not stuck in traffic, you ARE traffic”. Which is actually a quote from a TomTom ad I guess, still it’s related to transportation and goes through my mind on days I (foolishly) drive instead of bike and get caught up on the beltway.

[TwoWheelsDC]

“America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed.” -Eleanor Roosevelt

[lordofthemark]

“He cycled around Dublin…in his pin-striped suit with £10,000 on his head.”

“Life is like riding a bicycle, to keep your balance you must keep moving”

[Rootchopper]

It’s a tie:

“The farther one travels, the less one knows.”

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”

“Some kind of happiness is measured out in miles.”

Since I like all three, I must me a happy idiot on the road to nowhere.

[Bilsko]

I’m going waaaaaaay off topic with this one, but this quote just caught my eye this morning:

“It takes about the same amount of computing to answer one Google Search query as all the computing done — in flight and on the ground — for the entire Apollo program.” -Seb Schmoller
Edit: Source: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/the-power-of-apollo-missions-in-single.html

Trying to tie that back to something at least somewhat bike-related, I wonder what comparitors there are for bike technology today to the early age technologies. Sure, frame materials and strength:weight ratios are pretty easy to figure out, but are there other metrics that show the same kind of exponential improvements like we’ve seen in the computing/info-tech world? (Side-note Thomas Homer-Dixon’s ‘The Ingenuity Gap’ has a great chapter on the impressive growth/advancement of some technologies)

[vvill]

@Bilsko 31607 wrote:

but are there other metrics that show the same kind of exponential improvements like we’ve seen in the computing/info-tech world?

I doubt it. The safety bike was so close to perfection already. Hard to improve on the energy efficiency of cycling.

I wonder how they measure “amount of computing”. Number of instructions? Calculations? CPU cycles? Given Moore’s Law it’d be surprising to me if a Google Search didn’t stack up against something from 1969.

[baiskeli]

Not really a quote, but…

http://grist.org/list/2011-10-17-giant-bikes-strike-back-at-stupid-gm-ad/

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