Peter Walker > Quotes

“The Supreme Arrogance of Religious Thinking:

That a carbon-based bag of mostly water on a speck of iron-silicate dust around a boring dwarf star in a minor galaxy in an underpopulated local group of galaxies in an unfashionable suburb of a supecluster would look up at the sky and declare "it was all made so I could exist”
― Peter Walker

“people who commuted by bike had a 40 per cent lower chance of dying during the fifteen-year course of the project than those who didn’t. That’s not far short of a miracle. If these benefits could be administered in an injection, it would be considered one of the greatest medical breakthroughs of all time. The”
― Peter Walker, Bike Nation: How Cycling Can Save the World

“I delve into the mysterious and counterintuitive world of helmets and high-visibility gear later in the book. But it's worth immediately noting this: while they're not inherently bad, they're less a safety device for cycling than a symptom of a road network where no cyclist can truly feel safe.”
― Peter Walker, How Cycling Can Save the World

“Fr Gill sat behind his desk in a room crammed with furniture, every surface covered with geological layers of papers and chimneys of books, lightly mantled with dust and pipe ash.”
― Peter Walker

“In their thousand-year isolation the Māoris had discovered a certain pitch of the human voice, like that of the woman whose chant was still rising and rising in the air, which instantly and without exception made anyone who heard it cry.”
― Peter Walker

“At best a sort of institutionalized coping strategy, at worst a variant of Stockholm syndrome”
― Peter Walker, How Cycling Can Save the World