Coincidentally, I have a load of these to use as signatures on my emails - here's the bulk of them, not sure all would qualify as "famous" though.
"I'm lazy. But it's the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn't like walking or carrying things."
-Lech Walesa
"Just as the ideal of classic Greek culture was the most perfect harmony of mind and body, so a human and a bicycle are the perfect synthesis of body and machine."
- Richard Ballantine
"You never have the wind with you - either it is against you or you're having a good day."
~Daniel Behrman
"Since the bicycle makes little demand on material or energy resources, contributes little to pollution, makes a positive contribution to health and causes little death or injury, it can be regarded as the most benevolent of machines."
-Stuart S. Wilson, Oxford University
"Whoever invented the bicycle deserves the thanks of humanity."
- Lord Charles Beresford
"The bicycle enables us to escape many other machines: We use it for transportation, sport, recreation, and make it a way of life."
- Jobst Brandt
"Free your feet or your ass will follow."
-Good advice to new clipless pedal users
"Ride your bike, ride your bike, ride your bike"
-Fausto Coppi (when a reporter asked him what it takes to become such a great champion)
"I still feel that variable gears are only for people over forty-five. Isn't it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailer? We are getting soft... As for me, give me a fixed gear!"
-Henri Desgrange, the founder of the Tour de France.
"For city bicycling to catch on we need a revolution in our society's infrastructure. Right now a city rider needs to be a road warrior, and the bike needs to be cheap and ugly so it won't get stolen. That's not a bike friendly culture."
- Gary Fisher, founder and CEO of Fisher Bicycles
"Bicycling is human scale- a living, breathing alternative to the city's domination by motor vehicles. There is magic in blending with traffic, feeling the wind in one's face, the sheer fact of traversing the city under one's own power."
- Charles Komanoff, cycling advocate
"Don't buy upgrades; ride up grades."
- Eddy Merckx
"The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart."
-Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green
"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
"In this age of mindless consumerism, of atomized populations living in boxes, working in boxes, and traveling in boxes, almost always alone, with only the electronic voices of their new feudal lords to guide them through life, the bicycle becomes an instrument of gentle revolution."
-Richard Risemberg
"The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community."
~Ann Strong
"The best rides are the ones where you bite off much more than you can chew--and live through it."
-Doug Bradbury
"Everyday there's something that reminds me why I love this sport."
-Bernard Hinault on Cycling
"There are too many factors you have to take into account that you have no control over...The most important factor you can keep in your own hands is yourself. I always placed the greatest emphasis on that."
-Eddy Merckx
"A bicycle ride is a flight from sadness."
-James E. Starrs
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