Mobility Quotes

“A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“Without some redistribution of wealth and power, downward mobility and debilitating poverty will continue to drive people into desperate channels. And without principled opposition to xenophobias from above and below, these desperate channels will produce a cold-hearted and mean-spirited America no longer worth fighting for or living in.”
― Cornel West, Race Matters

“Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto.”
― Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity

“In addition to the transience of their members, churches themselves face a crisis of hypermobility. Many churches have put down only shallow roots in their neighborhood, or no roots at all. We’ve all heard the question, “If our church suddenly moved to a new location fifteen miles away, would anyone in our neighborhood notice we were gone?” But what if we asked ourselves this question: “If our church was magically lifted off the ground and moved to a location fifteen miles away, would we notice the difference?” Western churches have become so disentangled from their own places that this question could be a cold, hard look in the mirror for many faith communities.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“Older people sometimes talk about the good old days when life was better. In fact, they talk nostalgically about their own youth that was irretrievably gone. The past century has made enormous progress in all fields. The standard of living, work environment, health care quality and mobility, and the availability of cultural programs, recreational activities and information – all that clearly speaks in favor of nowadays.”
― Eraldo Banovac

“The two board games that best approximate the strategies of war are chess and the Asian game of go. In chess, the board is small. In comparison to go, the attack comes relatively quickly, forcing a decisive battle.... Go is much less formal. It is played on a large grid, with 361 intersections — nearly six times as many positions as in chess.... [A game of go] can last up to three hundred moves. The strategy is more subtle and fluid than chess, developing slowly; the more complex the pattern your stones initially create on the board, the harder it is for your opponent to understand your strategy. Fighting to control a particular area is not worth the trouble: You have to think in larger terms, to be prepared to sacrifice an area in order eventually to dominate the board. What you are after is not an entrenched position but mobility. With mobility you can isolate your opponent in small areas and then encircle them... Chess is linear, position oriented, and aggressive; go is nonlinear and fluid. Aggression is indirect until the end of the game, when the winner can surround the opponents' stones at an accelerated pace.”
― Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

“Our faith is often embodied in the relationships and neighborhoods where we live. In our world of globalization, technology, and mobility, we've misplaced the sacredness of place.
The act of staying and living in our place has an impact on us practically, of course, but also on us theologically. It's not always sexy to stay put, is it? In most of my church tradition, no one ever mentioned the holy work of staying.”
― Sarah Bessey, Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

“Water never stops and says, 'Here I am. This is me.' It is forever in motion and twisting and turning into new forms every moment.”
― Laurence Galian, 666: Connection with Crowley

“Avec un vélo, l'homme peut partager les bienfaits d'une conquête technique sans prétendre régenter les horaires, l'espace ou l'énergie d'autrui. Un cycliste est maître de sa propre mobilité sans empiéter sur celle des autres. Ce nouvel outil ne crée que des besoins qu'il peut satisfaire, au lieu que chaque accroissement de l'accélération produit par des véhicules à moteur crée de nouvelles exigences de temps et d'espace.”
― Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity

“If men and women need freedom and mobility, they also need a sense of tradition and belonging. There is nothing retrograde about roots. The postmodern cult of the migrant, which sometimes succeeds in making migrants sound even more enviable than rock stars, is a good deal too supercilious in this respect. It is a hangover from the modernist cult of the exile, the Satanic artist who scorns the suburban masses and plucks an elitist virtue out of his enforced dispossession. The problem at the moment is that the rich have mobility while the poor have locality. Or rather, the poor have locality until the rich get their hands on it. The rich are global and the poor are local - though just as poverty is a global fact, so the rich are coming to appreciate the benefits of locality.”
― Terry Eagleton, After Theory

“Experience, when no longer a measure of security, becomes what it is now:
freely exchangeable currency.”
― Gyan Nagpal, Talent Economics: The Fine Line Between Winning and Losing the Global War for Talent

“Experience”, when no longer a measure of security, becomes what it is now: freely exchangeable currency.”
― Gyan Nagpal, Talent Economics: The Fine Line Between Winning and Losing the Global War for Talent

“But while women were able to capitalize on Vietnam's rapid development, it is important to situate their mobility as constrained within structures of patriarchy.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“Over the years, I have grown to love airports, despite all the travel inconveniences which are getting worse every year. I don’t know why I have this strong desire to depart; to always be somewhere else. Maybe getting displaced and being forced out of my home as a result of war has turned me into a permanent nomad? Since I left Iraq for the first time in 2005, I almost always have a plane, bus, or train ticket to go somewhere. Sometimes I think of the mothers who abandon their unwanted babies at the doors of churches and mosques. I imagine that my mother, too, had left me at the door of an airport with a plane ticket instead of a pacifier in my mouth! And since then, I have been moving everywhere and arriving nowhere. Could it be that disillusion takes place precisely at the moment we arrive at a certain destination?”
― Louis Yako

“I found Baghdad, like most big cities in the world: big, exciting, interesting, rich, poor, hot, cold, restless, sleepless, and cruel at one and the same time.”
― Louis Yako

“If freedom, flexibility, and autonomy do not create chaos in a fast-paced basketball game, what stops us from adapting the same in the business world?”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Quantraz

“One of the most fascinating and unexpected findings was the role of wind in a tree’s life. Before reaching maturity, many trees in the biosphere snapped under their own weight. Researchers learned later this was caused by lack of stress wood—a wood that forms in place of normal wood as a response to external forces. This necessary mechanical acclimation was lacking in the biosphere trees, preventing them from surviving. There’s an underlying principle at work here. Stress creates resilience. Lack of stress creates weakness. In the case of the biosphere trees, the stress they were missing was wind. Wind doesn’t just blow in one direction, or at one speed. It’s constantly changing directions, slowing down, speeding up—creating an infinite array of forces for the trees to counterbalance against. Ironically, the lack of varied movement and counterforce is what felled the trees.

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― Scott H Hogan, Built from Broken: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body