Lance Armstrong

"Him? No way. Absolutely not, he has no conscience."

"The Tour (de France) is essentially a math problem, a 2,000-mile race over three weeks that's sometimes won by a margin of a minute or less. How do you propel yourself through space on a bicycle, sometimes steeply uphill, at a speed sustainable for three weeks? Every second counts."

"I follow the Tour de France about as much as the average North American person… I only know of it because of the success that Lance Armstrong has had. Michael Jordan was the greatest athlete I ever saw. Tiger Woods is now at a point where he is going to go down in history as something special. There's not a question that Lance Armstrong belongs with those two guys. Not only because of what he has done as an athlete, but also what he has been able to come back from."

"The perfect athlete is Lance Armstrong. What he achieved, no other human has or, in my opinion, will ever achieve. It's hard enough surviving cancer, but winning seven Tour de France titles after that is amazing. He is a true inspiration to me and makes me believe that nothing is impossible. When you have a dream and work hard at it, it's possible."

"If a script writer had come up with a story resembling what you have just achieved, even the Hollywood studios would have refused."

"A boo is a lot louder than a cheer, if you have 10 people cheering and one person booing all you hear is the booing."

"Every year the media comes up with something to describe my race … The first year it was "the comeback." Then it was the "the confirmation." I don't know what it was last year. This year, for me, it's "the year of the team." I can't say how I compare to the rider I was in 1999 or 2000 or 2001, but this team is much stronger than it has ever been. It has made it easier for me."

"No one trains like me. No one rides like me. This jersey's mine. I live for this jersey. It's my life. No one's taking it away from me. This fucking jersey's mine."

"I'm not happy if I'm not doing some physical suffering, like going out on a bike ride or running. First, it's good for you. No. 2, it sort of clears my mind on a daily basis. And it's a job. My job is to suffer. I make the suffering in training hard so that the races are not full of suffering."

"I don't have anything against organized religion per se. We all need something in our lives. I personally just have not accepted that belief. But I'm one of the few."

"Lance Armstrong: How bad do you want to win a stage in the Tour de France?"

"No gifts this year. I have given gifts on the Tour de France and very rarely has it ever come back to help me. This is the biggest bike race in the world and it means more than any bike race in the world. It means more to me than any bike race in the world. I want to win … no gifts."

"If there was a god, I'd still have both nuts."

"This is my body, and I can do whatever I want to it. I can push it. Study it. Tweak it. Listen to it. Everybody wants to know what I'm on. What am I on? I'm on my bike busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?"

"Finally, the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics: I'm sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. But this is one hell of a race. This is a great sporting event and you should stand around and believe it. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I'll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets — this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it. So Vive le Tour forever!"

"Jake, why are you sitting in the front? I thought you liked it in the rear."

"All their players tested positive... for being assholes."

"Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever."

"One of the redeeming things about being an athlete is redefining what is humanly possible."

"I'm a flawed character... I viewed this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times."

"I want to die at a hundred years old with an American flag on my back and the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles per hour. I want to cross one last finish line as my wife and my ten children applaud, and then I want to lie down in a field of those famous French sunflowers and gracefully expire, the perfect contradiction to my once anticipated poignant early demise."

"I wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsiblity to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, "But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven." If so, I was going to reply, "You know what? You're right. Fine.""

"Anything is possible. You can be told you have a 90-percent chance or a 50-percent chance or a 1-percent chance, but you have to believe, and you have to fight. By fight I mean arm yourself with all the available information, get second opinions, third opinions, and fourth opinions. Understand what has invaded your body, and what the possible cures are. It's another fact of cancer that the more informed and empowered patient has a better chance of long-term survival. What if I had lost? What if I relapsed and the cancer came back? I still believe I would have gained something in the struggle, because in what time I had left I would have been a more complete, compassionate, and intelligent man, and therefore more alive."

"A life spent defensively, worried, is a life wasted. You know when I need to die? When I'm done living. When I can't walk, can't eat, can't see, when I'm a crotchety old bastard, mad at the world. Then I can die."

"Life, to me, is a series of false limits and my challenge as an athlete is to explore those limits on a bike."

"I want all of you to know that I intend to beat this disease. And further, I intend to ride again as a professional cyclist."

"I want to finish by saying that I intend to be an avid spokesperson for testicular cancer once I have beaten the disease... I want this to be a positive experience and I want to take this opportunity to help others who might someday suffer from the same circumstance I face today."

"Without cancer, I never would have won a single Tour de France. Cancer taught me a plan for more purposeful living, and that in turn taught me how to train and to win more purposefully. It taught me that pain has a reason, and that sometimes the experience of losing things — whether health or a car or an old sense of self — has its own value in the scheme of life. Pain and loss are great enhancers."

"Niemand motiviert mich so wie Jan"