CCM Site Quote List

Last week I moved back to Chicago from L.A. and was treated to the BEST MASS EVER!
Where do I begin? I pulled into Daley Plaza at 6:05 and simply could not believe how crowded it was. About a mile or two into the ride, not long after it was hijacked, I got a head count of over 625. 625!!!!! Given that there were some people in front of me, and that there were some clumps that I undercounted, we probably had close to 700 riders. And three dogs. It was a festive ride with almost no confrontation - at least I didn't see any. And just when I thought it couldn't get better, we descended down to the Congress [Eisenhower] Expressway to join the traffic jam for a mile or so. The euphoria of the ride led some to strip naked in the glee of the moment.

There aren't 5,000 lunatic fringe bikers in our city. These are just ordinary people having a car-free experience.

Even if every car on the road was powered by corn oil, cars (and SUVs) would still be cutting us off, dooring us, running us over, recklessly accelerating, clogging up city streets (in motion and while parked), consuming tons of nonrenewable resources in their construction, fostering the continued growth of suburban sprawl, shutting people off from each other and from fresh air, leaking nasty fluids into parking lots, and in general making life miserable. That's why the only 'clean' car is... a bike.

Cars will eliminate a greater part of the nervousness, distraction, and strain of modern metropolitan life.

Human society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top.

The bicycle is the vehicle of a new mentality. It quietly challenges a system of values which condones dependency, wastage, inequality of mobility, and daily carnage

Autocentrism is a profit-driven worldview, an outgrowth of the same industrialism which brought us the prison-industrial-military complex,factory farms, and the understanding of human beings most fundamentally as cells with two functions: to produce, and to consume. This is why so many activist 'factions' have coalesced around the World Trade Organization protests; this is why Critical Mass can team up with Buy Nothing Day, or the homelessness rally on Lower Wacker Drive;...Forget objectivity. The velorution is at hand!