Bicycles, politics and society~ some related quotes

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

From Punch magazine, 1895. Dress vs. bicycle attire.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel...the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood. -Susan B. Anthony, 1896.

When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for man’s convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man’s brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others. Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle. -Elizabeth West

Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There is something wrong with a society that drives a car to work out in a gym. -Bill Nye, scientist and producer of science television programs.

Government must help to eliminate cars so that bicycles can help to eliminate government.- Advocacy slogan in Holland.

Advertisement from 1897 showing bloomers.
(Source:Wikimedia Commons)

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.

I began to feel that myself plus the bicycle equaled myself plus the world, upon whose spinning wheel we must all learn to ride, or fall into the sluice ways of oblivion and despair. That which made me succeed with the bicycle was precisely what had gained me a measure of success in life -- it was the hardihood of spirit that led me to begin, the persistence of will that held me to my task, and the patience that was willing to begin again when the last stroke had failed. And so I found high moral uses in the bicycle and can commend it as a teacher without pulpit or creed. She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life. -Frances E. Willard, How I Learned To Ride The Bicycle, 1895. 

It would not be at all strange if history came to the conclusion that the perfection of the bicycle was the greatest incident of the nineteenth century. -Anonymous

Early 20th Century bicycle. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

If, during the Second World War, the United States had retooled its factories for manufacturing bicycles instead of munitions, we’d be one of the healthiest, least oil-dependent, and most environmentally-sound constituents in the Nazi empire today. -Ralph Nader