A Quote by Elizabeth West

Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle. — © Elizabeth West
Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle.
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.
To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?
The question the doubter does not ask is whether faith was really useless or simply not used. What would you think of a boy who gave up learning to ride a bicycle, complaining that he hurt himself because his bicycle stopped moving so he had no choice but to fall off? If he wanted to sit comfortably while remaining stationary, he should not have chosen a bicycle but a chair. Similarly faith must be put to use, or it will become useless.
When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments.
I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle; I want to ride my bicycle; I want to ride my bike; I want to ride my bicycle; I want to ride it where I like...; I don't believe in Peter Pan, Frankenstein or Superman; All I wanna do is bicycle, bicycle, bicycle...
I couldn't have invented crisps. ... I don't really want to be known as the man who invented crisps. ... I invented apples. ... I invented pandas, and caps. I invented soil.
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
I've long stopped worrying about who invented whom - God man or man God.
Functionally, a man is somewhat like a bicycle. A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it's moving forward towards something.
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.
Anything invented before your fifteenth birthday is the order of nature. That's how it should be. Anything invented between your th and th birthday is new and exciting, and you might get a career there. Anything invented after that day, however, is against nature and should be prohibited.
Man who invented the hamburger was smart; man who invented the cheeseburger was a genius.
We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce,mind you. And we invented infidelity,too, as well as romantic misery. In fact we invented the whole sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.
Sex was invented as a biological instrument by (say) the green algae. But as an instrument in the ascent of man which is basic to his cultural evolution, it was invented by man himself.
There is no place in contemporary Karate-do for different schools. Some instructors, I know, claim to have invented new and unusual kata, and so they arrogate to themselves the right to be called founders of "schools". Indeed, I have heard myself and my colleagues referred to as the Shoto-kan school, but I strongly object to this attempt at classification. My belief is that all these "schools" should be amalgamated into one so that Karate-do may pursue and orderly and useful progress into man's future.
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.
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