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

Some people bear three kinds of trouble – the ones they’ve had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.

There’s nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn’t abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century – for several centuries.

It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not pay with their own.

I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays golf – it’s almost a law.

The past is but the past of a beginning.

Leaders should lead as far as they can and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have lit.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile…But this happy sensation wears off.

We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.

I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel – the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.

I think bicycle has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance.

She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life.

My toys were those of a boy: skates, bicycles.

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.