Which are your favorite Lance Armstrong quotes?
Lance Armstrong is an American professional cyclist, author, and public speaker who was regarded as a sports icon for his seven consecutive Tour de France wins from 1999 to 2005. However, his reputation was tarnished by a doping scandal and he was stripped of all of his achievements.
Armstrong began swimming and running at a young age. He turned professional when he joined the Motorola team in 1992, and one year later he became the second-youngest man to win in world road racing.
Here’s a collection of the most humbling Lance Armstrong quotes:
50 Humbling & Inspirational Lance Armstrong Quotes
1. “I would love to be in a place, and I may never get there, where I can help people. It’s something that I never really cared to advertise. It got advertised. I still do it on one-on-one level almost daily.” – Lance Armstrong
2. “If children have the ability to ignore all odds and percentages, then maybe we can all learn from them. When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope? We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up, or fight like hell.” – Lance Armstrong
3. “Hard work, sacrifice, and focus will never show up in tests.” – Lance Armstrong
4. “If you worried about falling off the bike, you’d never get on.” – Lance Armstrong
5. “Winning is about heart, not just legs. It’s got to be in the right place.” – Lance Armstrong
6. “I look forward to a time when lawyers aren’t in the top three calls every day, and all you care about is how your kids are doing in school or what the weather’s like and the great day you had with your family.” – Lance Armstrong
7. “If you ever get a second chance in life for something, you’ve got to go all the way.” – Lance Armstrong
8. “It’s frustrating in the sense that I still think I could be competing at some sport at a fairly high level, which nobody cares about. Nobody wants to hear me say that.” – Lance Armstrong
9. “If you go to Wikipedia and you look at the Tour de France, there’s this huge block in World War One with no winners, and there’s another block in World War Two. And then it seems like there’s another world war.” – Lance Armstrong
10. “I wanted to win the Tour de France. And when I won it once, I wanted to do it again, and again, and again, it just kept going. So there wasn’t another competitive environment.” – Lance Armstrong
10th of 50 Lance Armstrong Quotes
11. “If I was racing in 2015, no, I wouldn’t do it again because I don’t think you have to. If you take me back to 1995, when doping was completely pervasive, I would probably do it again.” – Lance Armstrong
12. “I’m not trying to justify myself, or say I’m not sorry, or not contrite.” – Lance Armstrong
13. “There was certainly a dishonesty there that I think is totally regrettable and inexcusable. The ringleading, the bullying: not totally true.” – Lance Armstrong
14. “I don’t think anybody else from my generation had federal agents standing at their door with a badge and a gun, saying: ‘You are going to answer my questions’.” – Lance Armstrong
15. “I don’t need a field of a thousand people. Anybody can tell you that whoever needs help, I’m happy to help.” – Lance Armstrong
16. “I spent a long time trying to build up an organisation [the Lance Armstrong Foundation that changed its name to Livestrong after his confession] to help a lot of people.” – Lance Armstrong
17. “Cycling is so hard, the suffering is so intense, that it’s absolutely cleansing. The pain is so deep and strong that a curtain descends over your brain….Once; someone asked me what pleasure I took in riding for so long. ‘PLEASURE???? I said.’ ‘I don’t understand the question.’ I didn’t do it for the pleasure; I did it for the pain.” – Lance Armstrong
18. “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.” – Lance Armstrong
19. “I tried to control the narrative.” – Lance Armstrong
20th of 50 Lance Armstrong Quotes
20. “At this point of my life, I’m not out to protect anybody. I’m out to protect seven people, and they all have the last name Armstrong.” – Lance Armstrong
21. “I got the three things I wanted. I did my job, I worked hard in the process, and I cherish the memories, and they’re mine.” – Lance Armstrong
22. “Truth is, a triathlete won the Tour de France seven times.” – Lance Armstrong
23. “That was my decision, so I have to be responsible for that. It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life and I don’t have a good reason for why I wanted to come back, I don’t have a good reason for doing it all.” – Lance Armstrong
24. “Cancer doesn’t care if you’re Republican or Democrat.” – Lance Armstrong
25. “I figure the faster I pedal, the faster I can retire.” – Lance Armstrong
26. “I raced because I was paid to do a job and I felt like I had to do the job. Number two: I raced because I loved the process, I loved training, getting ready for the race, I loved all of that. And number three I raced for my memories. Regardless of what somebody wants to give or take away, you can’t take my memories.” – Lance Armstrong
27. “My mother told me…if you’re going to get anywhere, you’re going to have to do it yourself, because no one is going to do it for you.” – Lance Armstrong
28. “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.” – Lance Armstrong
29. “We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up or fight like hell.” – Lance Armstrong
30th of 50 Lance Armstrong Quotes
30. “Nobody wants to hear how I think I’ve been mistreated, or how I think my punishment should be lifted, or tweaked, or reduced. Nobody wants to hear me say that, nobody cares what I think about this. I get it.” – Lance Armstrong
31. “You know, once I was thinking of quitting when I was diagnosed with brain, lung, and testicular cancer all at the same time. But with the love and support of my friends and family, I got back on the bike and won the Tour de France five times in a row. But I’m sure you have a good reason to quit.” – Lance Armstrong
32. “For whatever reason, maybe it’s because of my story, but people associate Livestrong with exercise and physical fitness, health and lifestyle choices like that.” – Lance Armstrong
33. “I believe that the mind powers the body, and once the mind says we want to do it, then the body will follow.” – Lance Armstrong
34. “The ban doesn’t have anything to do with Livestrong or my ability to work in (the cancer) community. Perhaps it speeds it up. I don’t know the examples in Great Britain of athletes who have fallen. I know the examples in the United States – the Tiger Woods, the Michael Vicks, even the Bill Clintons – people who are still out there able to work.” – Lance Armstrong
35. “Giving up was never an option.” – Lance Armstrong
36. “There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say: ‘Enough is enough.” – Lance Armstrong
37. “When I made the decision – when my team-mates made that decision, when the whole peloton made that decision – it was a bad decision and an imperfect time. But it happened.” – Lance Armstrong
38. “Everything in my life is in perspective. OK, perspective ebbs and flows. I’ve had bad days, but they weren’t in the last years. A bad day is 2 October 1996: ‘We’ve got bad news for you, you’ve got advanced testicular cancer and you’ve got a coin’s toss chance of survival.’ That’s a bad day.” – Lance Armstrong
39. “I take nothing for granted. I now have only good days, or great days.” – Lance Armstrong
40th of 50 Lance Armstrong Quotes
40. “The truth is, if you asked me to choose between winning the Tour de France and cancer, I would choose cancer. Odd as it sounds, I would rather have the title of cancer survivor than winner of the Tour, because of what it has done for me as a human being, a man, a husband, a son, and a father.” – Lance Armstrong
41. “Portland, Oregon won’t build a mile of road without a mile of bike path. You can commute there, even with that weather, all the time.” – Lance Armstrong
42. “I guess if I looked at it from an athletic standpoint, I don’t really need to win another Tour. Seven Tours for me was a dream, six broke the record so that eight doesn’t really mean much.” – Lance Armstrong
43. “We all want to be forgiven. There’s a lot of really, really bad people who want to be forgiven but will never be forgiven, and I might be in that camp.” – Lance Armstrong
44. “I become a happier man each time I suffer.” – Lance Armstrong
45. “Forever is a big word. I’m not going anywhere.” – Lance Armstrong
46. “Anything is possible. You can be told that 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.” – Lance Armstrong
47. “Anyone who imagines they can work alone winds up surrounded by nothing but rivals, without companions. The fact is, no one ascends alone.” – Lance Armstrong
48. “What matters is ultimately what collectively those people on the street – whether that’s the cycling community, the cancer community – it matters what they think.” – Lance Armstrong
49. “It’s tougher for me. But I don’t think that’s imperative to me starting a new movement, or revive an old movement, to help people.” – Lance Armstrong
50. “My actions and reactions, and the way I treated certain scenarios, were way out of line, so I deserved some punishment.” – Lance Armstrong
Summary
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