“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 wrote this in her 1965 novel The Red and the Green — the attribution actually holds: the line appears in the text itself, not just floating around quote sites, cited back to the same chapter across independent sources. A novelist’s throwaway line about cycling that outlasted the plot around it.