Quotes about travel
page 13

“So what do you believe in?
Nothing fixed or final,
all the while I
travel a miracle. I doubt,
and yet
I walk upon the water.”

Sydney Carter (1915–2004) British musician and poet

"So what do you believe in?"

Pliny the Younger photo

“Objects which are usually the motives of our travels by land and by sea are often overlooked and neglected if they lie under our eye.”
Ad quae noscenda iter ingredi, transmittere mare solemus, ea sub oculis posita neglegimu. ... Differimus tamquam saepe visuri, quod datur videre quotiens velis cernere.

Pliny the Younger (61–113) Roman writer

Letter 20, 1.
Letters, Book VIII
Context: Objects which are usually the motives of our travels by land and by sea are often overlooked and neglected if they lie under our eye.... We put off from time to time going and seeing what we know we have an opportunity of seeing when we please.

John Maynard Keynes photo

“To our generation Einstein has been made to become a double symbol — a symbol of the mind travelling in the cold regions of space, and a symbol of the brave and generous outcast, pure in heart and cheerful of spirit.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Collected Writings volume xxviii pages 21-22
Context: The boys, who cannot grow up to adult human nature, are beating the prophets of the ancient race — Marx, Freud, Einstein — who have been tearing at our social, personal and intellectual roots, tearing with an objectivity which to the healthy animal seems morbid, depriving everything, as it seems, of the warmth of natural feeling. What traditional retort have the schoolboys but a kick in the pants?...
To our generation Einstein has been made to become a double symbol — a symbol of the mind travelling in the cold regions of space, and a symbol of the brave and generous outcast, pure in heart and cheerful of spirit. Himself a schoolboy, too, but the other kind — with ruffled hair, soft hands and a violin. See him as he squats on Cromer beach doing sums, Charlie Chaplin with the brow of Shakespeare...
So it is not an accident that the Nazi lads vent a particular fury against him. He does truly stand for what they most dislike, the opposite of the blond beast — intellectualist, individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump... How should they know the glory of the free-ranging intellect and soft objective sympathy to whom money and violence, drink and blood and pomp, mean absolutely nothing? Yet Albert and the blond beast make up the world between them. If either cast the other out, life is diminished in its force. When the barbarians destroy the ancient race as witches, when they refuse to scale heaven on broomsticks, they may be dooming themselves to sink back into the clods which bore them.

Herodotus photo
Loreena McKennitt photo

“There is a wonderful old Chinese proverb that I love, "A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving".”

Loreena McKennitt (1957) Canadian musician and composer

Celtic Women in Music interview (1999)
Context: There is a wonderful old Chinese proverb that I love, "A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving". I think about my personal approach to musical projects much like a travel writer might approach the preparation for a book. You latch on to a certain theme or historical event and follow that into the unknown, while, at the same time, expanding on those themes.

Phil Ochs photo

“Before the days of television and mass media, the folksinger was often a traveling newspaper spreading tales through music.”

Phil Ochs (1940–1976) American protest singer and songwriter

Introduction to "(The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of) Santo Domingo," Phil Ochs in Concert (1966)
Context: Before the days of television and mass media, the folksinger was often a traveling newspaper spreading tales through music. There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

Jimmy Carter photo

“The greater ease of travel and communication has not been matched by equal understanding and mutual respect.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Post-Presidency, Nobel lecture (2002)
Context: Ladies and gentlemen: Twelve years ago, President Mikhail Gorbachev received your recognition for his preeminent role in ending the Cold War that had lasted fifty years. But instead of entering a millennium of peace, the world is now, in many ways, a more dangerous place. The greater ease of travel and communication has not been matched by equal understanding and mutual respect. There is a plethora of civil wars, unrestrained by rules of the Geneva Convention, within which an overwhelming portion of the casualties are unarmed civilians who have no ability to defend themselves. And recent appalling acts of terrorism have reminded us that no nations, even superpowers, are invulnerable. It is clear that global challenges must be met with an emphasis on peace, in harmony with others, with strong alliances and international consensus.

Geoff Dyer photo
Al Gore photo

“Our future is dependent upon increasing cooperation and interdependence in a world tied ever more closely together by technologies of communications and travel.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Quotes, NYU Speech (2004)
Context: Our future is dependent upon increasing cooperation and interdependence in a world tied ever more closely together by technologies of communications and travel. The emergence of a truly global civilization has been accompanied by the recognition of truly global challenges that require global responses that, as often as not, can only be led by the United States — and only if the United States restores and maintains its moral authority to lead.

“Physics and psychology are going somewhere, but where they do not know. But… they are traveling”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Context: Physics and psychology are going somewhere, but where they do not know. But... they are traveling from: Democritan permanent particles and the Cartesian mind necessarily aware.... they are both traveling away from the same point of origin and in the same general direction: from the isolation of supposedly permanent "substances" towards the identification of changing relations potentially affecting everything; briefly, from substance to changing relations and structures.

George Eliot photo

“No farther will I travel: once again
My brethren I will see, and that fair plain
Where I and song were born.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

The Legend of Jubal (1869)
Context: No farther will I travel: once again
My brethren I will see, and that fair plain
Where I and song were born. There fresh-voiced youth
Will pour my strains with all the early truth
Which now abides not in my voice and hands,
But only in the soul, the will that stands
Helpless to move. My tribe remembering Will cry,
"'Tis he!" and run to greet me, welcoming.

Rod McKuen photo

“As friends and as musical collaborators we had traveled, toured and written — together and apart — the events of our lives as if they were songs, and I guess they were. When news of Jacques’ death came I stayed locked in my bedroom and drank for a week.”

Rod McKuen (1933–2015) American poet, songwriter, composer, and singer

On Jacques Brel, in liner notes for Greatest Hits - Without a Worry in the World (August 1992)
Context: As friends and as musical collaborators we had traveled, toured and written — together and apart — the events of our lives as if they were songs, and I guess they were. When news of Jacques’ death came I stayed locked in my bedroom and drank for a week. That kind of self pity was something he wouldn’t have approved of, but all I could do was replay our songs (our children) and ruminate over our unfinished life together.

P. J. O'Rourke photo
Claude Lévi-Strauss photo

“I hate travelling and explorers.”

Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Ch. 1 : Setting Out, p. 17
Context: I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions. But how long it has taken me to make up my mind to do so! It is now fifteen years since I left Brazil for the last time and all during this period I have often planned to undertake the present work but on each occasion a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me from making a start. Why, I asked myself, should I give a detailed account of so many trivial circumstances and insignificant happenings? Adventure has no place in the anthropologists profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months; there are hours of inaction when the informant is not available; periods of hunger, exhaustion, sickness perhaps; and always the thousand and one dreary tasks which eat away the days to no purpose and reduce dangerous living in the heart of the virgin forest to an imitation of military service … The fact that so much effort and expenditure has to be wasted on reaching the object of our studies bestows no value on that aspect of our profession, and should be seen rather as its negative side. The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when we have separated them from this dross.

Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

“This is a long tough road we have to travel.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

Letter to Vernon Prichard (27 August 1942), published in The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower (1970) edited by Alfred Dupont Chandler, p. 505
1940s
Context: This is a long tough road we have to travel. The men that can do things are going to be sought out just as surely as the sun rises in the morning. Fake reputations, habits of glib and clever speech, and glittering surface performance are going to be discovered.

Hartley Coleridge photo

“Rising now, anon descending,
Swift and bright as shooting stars,
Thus we travel glad and free.”

Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) British poet, biographer, essayist, and teacher

Sylphs
Poems (1851), Prometheus
Context: Lightly tripping o'er the land,
Deftly skimming o'er the main,
Scarce our fairy wings bedewing
With the frothy mantling brine,
Scarce our silver feet acquainting
With the verdure-vested ground;
Now like swallows o'er a river
Gliding low with quivering pinion,
Now aloft in ether sailing
"Leisurely as summer cloud;"
Rising now, anon descending,
Swift and bright as shooting stars,
Thus we travel glad and free.

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Context: Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

Cass Elliot photo

“So many people in show business go into politics, and I used to say "What the heck do they know about it?" But when you travel around, you really do get to feel — not to be cliche — the pulse of the country and what people want. I'm concerned and it's not good to be unconcerned and just sit there.”

Cass Elliot (1941–1974) American singer

Appearance on The Mike Douglas Show; as quoted at the official Cass Elliot website http://www.casselliot.com/career.htm
Context: I think I would like to be a Senator or something in twenty years. I don't think I really know enough yet. I'm just 30 now and I wouldn't even be eligible to run for office for another five years. But I have a lot of feelings about things. I know the way I would like to see things for this country and in my travels, when I talk to people, everybody wants pretty much the same thing: peace, enough jobs, no poverty and good education. And I've learned a lot. It's funny. So many people in show business go into politics, and I used to say "What the heck do they know about it?" But when you travel around, you really do get to feel — not to be cliche — the pulse of the country and what people want. I'm concerned and it's not good to be unconcerned and just sit there.

“The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"I Think of Those Who Were Truly Great"
Poems (1933)
Context: Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted in the waving grass
And by the streamers of the white cloud
And whispers of the wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

Bill Bailey photo

“Even if you’re not particularly religious, then you have to admit that religion surrounds us even in the most mundane aspects of our lives. I was trying to rent a car, and the bloke said to me: "You’re not covered for acts of God."
I said: "What do you mean by that?", he said: [waving arms] "Woooooh!"
I said, "Can you be a bit more specific?", and he went, [vaguely gesticulating] "Eh… ooooh… uh?"
I said, "I’m intrigued because you said 'acts of God', and not gods, or spirits, or jinn, or nymphs, but 'God', a capital God, a monotheistic religion, maybe a Judeo-Christian religion, which would imply a belief system, which would perhaps lead to free-will and determinism, so logically anything that man does directly or indirectly is in fact an act of God, so I’m not covered for anything!"
He said, "I’ll get the manager."
Then I said, "What do you mean by an act of God? What do you mean by that?"
He said, "I dunno, a plague of locusts or something."
"'A plague of locusts'? They swarm round the vehicle, rip the wing mirrors off, and I’m liable for a fifty pound excess?”
And he said, "No, like, rain or something."
I said, "Yeah, but how much rain? It’s drizzling a bit now, is that an act of God? At what point does the rain reach a certain level beyond which it takes on the more apocalyptic mantle of the water-based punishment of the Lord!?"
And he said, [despairing] "I just work Saturdays."
I said "You can’t answer me, can you? Your policy is riddled with theological inconsistency. You disgust me. You twist and turn. You remind me of the Siberian hunting spider, which adopts a highly-convincing limp in three of its eight legs in order to attract its main prey, the so-called Samaritan squirrel, which takes pity on the spider, and then the spider jumps on it and injects the paralysing venom, and the squirrel remains bafflingly philosophical about the whole thing. Not to be confused with the Ukrainian hunting spider, which actually has got a limp and is, as such, completely harmless, and a little bit bitter about the whole thing: [imitating spider] 'Siberian spider have good leg, have nice day, can catch fly, can make web, can catch fly for family, I can do nothing, my leg, it drags behind! It drags! [audience laughs] And you laugh! You make fun! Oh, ha, big joke! I am failure! I am freak! [singing] But in my dreams I can fly, I'm the greatest spider in town. But I wake and it's cold, and I feel so old, and my legs are dragging me down.'"
And then the manager came out, and he said: “Stop all that spider singing."”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Pointed to a sign on the wall: a spider with a line through it. "Oh, fair enough."
He said "I can offer you an upgrade, fifty quid, and we can include in it policies set in place by the Marquis de Laplace, the French scientist who declared that all things in the universe are predetermined, so you would be covered even if time-travel was invented during the period of rental.”
I said, "Nah, probably leave it."
Part Troll (2004)

James Branch Cabell photo

“Thus will the traveller return — by and by — to the place of his starting; the legend of the second coming of the Redeemer will be justified, in, at all events, my lesser world; and the tale to Manuel's life will have come again, as it did once beside the pool of Haranton, full circle.”

The Epilogue : Which is the proper ending of all comedies; and heralds, it may be, an afterpiece.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
Context: It is true I have not told you everything. Why should I? No Author ever does.... With Felix Kennaston — or, if you prefer it so, with Horvendile, — rests safe this secret and peculiar knowledge as to how the life of Manuel may yet repair to it's first home after some seven centuries of exile. Thus will the traveller return — by and by — to the place of his starting; the legend of the second coming of the Redeemer will be justified, in, at all events, my lesser world; and the tale to Manuel's life will have come again, as it did once beside the pool of Haranton, full circle.

Nicholas Roerich photo

“Wayfarer, friend, let us travel together. Night is near, wild beasts are about, and our campfire may go out. But if we agree to share the night watch, we can conserve our forces.”

Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, enlightener, philosopher

Introduction
New Era Community (1926)
Context: Wayfarer, friend, let us travel together. Night is near, wild beasts are about, and our campfire may go out. But if we agree to share the night watch, we can conserve our forces.
Tomorrow our path will be long and we may become exhausted. Let us walk together. We shall have joy and festivity. I shall sing for you the song your mother, wife and sister sang. You will relate for me your father's story about a hero and his achievements. Let our path be one.
Be careful not to step upon a scorpion, and warn me about any vipers. Remember, we must arrive at a certain mountain village.
Traveler, be my friend.

Hoyt Axton photo

“Travel where you will and grow to be a man
And sing what must be sung, poor boy
Sing what must be sung.”

Hoyt Axton (1938–1999) American country singer

Greenback Dollar (1963)
Context: When I was a little baby, my mama she said "Son.
Travel where you will and grow to be a man
And sing what must be sung, poor boy
Sing what must be sung."

Porphyry (philosopher) photo

“The utility of a science which enables men to take cognizance of the travellers on the mind's highway, and excludes those disorderly interlopers, verbal fallacies, needs but small attestation.”

Porphyry (philosopher) (233–301) Neoplatonist philosopher

Introduction to Aristotle's Organon, as translated by Octavius Freire Owen (1853), p. v
Context: The utility of a science which enables men to take cognizance of the travellers on the mind's highway, and excludes those disorderly interlopers, verbal fallacies, needs but small attestation. Its searching penetration by definition alone, before which even mathematical precision fails, would especially commend it to those whom the abstruseness of the study does not terrify, and who recognise the valuable results which must attend discipline of mind. Like a medicine, though not a panacea for every ill, it has the health of the mind for its aim, but requires the determination of a powerful will to imbibe its nauseating yet wholesome influence: it is no wonder therefore that puny intellects, like weak stomachs, abhor and reject it.

Sri Aurobindo photo

“This too the traveller of the worlds must dare.”

Savitri (1918-1950), Book Two : The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds
Context: p>As in a studio of creative Death
The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan
The drama of the earth, their tragic stage.
All who would raise the fallen world must come
Under the dangerous arches of their power;
For even the radiant children of the gods
To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.
None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.This too the traveller of the worlds must dare.</p

Alfred, Lord Tennyson photo

“I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees”

13 -17
Ulysses (1842)
Context: I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

Robert Louis Stevenson photo

“There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign”

The Silverado Squatters.
Context: There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear.

John Quincy Adams photo

“Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated: the field of politics supplies the alchymists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Oration at Plymouth (1802)
Context: Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated: the field of politics supplies the alchymists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction. Our age is too enlightened to contend upon topics, which concern only the interests of eternity; and men who hold in proper contempt all controversies about trifles, except such as inflame their own passions, have made it a common-place censure against your ancestors, that their zeal was enkindled by subjects of trivial importance; and that however aggrieved by the intolerance of others, they were alike intolerant themselves. Against these objections, your candid judgment will not require an unqualified justification; but your respect and gratitude for the founders of the State may boldly claim an ample apology. The original grounds of their separation from the church of England, were not objects of a magnitude to dissolve the bonds of communion; much less those of charity, between Christian brethren of the same essential principles.

Adlai Stevenson photo

“We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed, for our safety, to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Speech to the UN Economic and Social Council, Geneva, Switzerland (9 July 1965)
Context: We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed, for our safety, to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave — to the ancient enemies of man — half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.

Ray Bradbury photo

“We need something larger than ourselves — that's a real religious activity. That's what space travel can be — relating ourselves to the universe.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Playboy interview (1996)
Context: We could have built a colony on the moon and moved on to Mars. We need something larger than ourselves — that's a real religious activity. That's what space travel can be — relating ourselves to the universe. … NASA is to blame — the entire government is to blame — and the end of the Cold War really pulled the plug, draining any passion that remained.

Alexander Herrmann photo

“The very best illusions of the best magicians of a few years ago are now the common property of traveling showmen at country fairs.”

Alexander Herrmann (1844–1896) French magician

As quoted in Cosmopolitan (December 1892).
Context: A so-called magician, more than a poet, must be born with a peculiar aptitude for the calling. He must first of all possess a mind of contrarieties, quick to grasp the possibilities of seemingly producing the most opposite effects from the most natural causes. He must be original and quick-witted, never to be taken unawares. He must possess, in no small degree, a knowledge of the exact sciences, and he must spend a lifetime in practice, for in the profession its emoluments come very slowly. All this is discouraging enough, but this is not all. The magician must expect the exposure of his tricks sooner or later, and see what it has required long months of study and time to perfect dissolved in an hour. The very best illusions of the best magicians of a few years ago are now the common property of traveling showmen at country fairs. I might instance the mirror illusions of Houdin; the cabinet trick of the Davenport Brothers, and the second sight of Heller — all the baffling puzzles of the days in which the respective magicians mentioned lived. All this is not a pleasant prospective picture for the aspirant for the honors of the magician.

François-René de Chateaubriand photo

“I have borne the musket of a soldier, the traveller’s cane, and the pilgrim’s staff: as a sailor my fate has been as inconstant as the wind: a kingfisher, I have made my nest among the waves.”

Preface (1833).
Mémoires d'outre-tombe (1848 – 1850)
Context: I have borne the musket of a soldier, the traveller’s cane, and the pilgrim’s staff: as a sailor my fate has been as inconstant as the wind: a kingfisher, I have made my nest among the waves.
I have been party to peace and war: I have signed treaties, protocols, and along the way published numerous works. I have been made privy to party secrets, of court and state: I have viewed closely the rarest disasters, the greatest good fortune, the highest reputations. I have been present at sieges, congresses, conclaves, at the restoration and demolition of thrones. I have made history, and been able to write it. … Within and alongside my age, perhaps without wishing or seeking to, I have exerted upon it a triple influence, religious, political and literary.

Claude Lévi-Strauss photo

“The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.”

Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 4 : The Quest for Power, p. 38
Context: The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

Woody Guthrie photo

“I'm just a lonesome traveler, The Great Historical Bum.”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

The Columbia River Collection (1941), Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done
Context: I'm just a lonesome traveler, The Great Historical Bum.
Highly educated from history I have come.
I built the Rock of Ages, 'twas in the Year of One
And that was about the biggest thing that man had ever done.
I worked in the Garden of Eden, that was the year of two,
Joined the apple pickers union, I always paid my due;
I'm the man that signed the contract to raise the rising sun,
And that was about the biggest thing that man had ever done

Ramakrishna photo

“I realized that there is only one God toward whom all are travelling; but the paths are different.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 129
Context: I had to practise each religion for a time — Hinduism, Islām, Christianity. Furthermore, I followed the paths of the Śāktas, Vaishnavas, and Vedāntists. I realized that there is only one God toward whom all are travelling; but the paths are different.

Stephen Vincent Benét photo
Erik Naggum photo

“Travel is a meat thing.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Usenet signatures

Reza Pahlavi photo
Benjamin Franklin photo

“Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …
Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare photo
Stafford Cripps photo
Ernest King photo

“Both in Europe and in the Pacific long roads still lie ahead. But we are now fully entered on those roads, fortified with unity, power, and experience, imbued with confidence and determined to travel far and fast to victory.”

Ernest King (1878–1956) United States Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations

First Report, p. 93
U.S. Navy at War, 1941-1945: Official Reports to the Secretary of the Navy (1946)

Brian W. Aldiss photo
Helena Roerich photo
Adlai Stevenson photo
Ho Chi Minh photo
Robert Sheckley photo
Newton Lee photo
Mahatma Gandhi photo
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar photo
Iain Banks photo

“They spend time. That’s just it. They spend time traveling. The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They persist in hoping that something they think they’ll find in the place they’re heading for will somehow provide them with a fulfilment they feel certain they deserve and yet have never come close to experiencing.”

Ziller frowned and tapped at his pipe bowl. “Some travel forever in hope and are serially disappointed. Others, slightly less self-deceiving, come to accept that the process of travelling itself offers, if not fulfilment, then relief from the feeling that they should be feeling fulfilled.”
Source: Culture series, Look to Windward (2000), Chapter 5 “A Very Attractive System” (p. 113)

Algis Budrys photo

“Chicago for me means life. I have lived in Chicago all my life. It keeps calling me back even though I have tried to escape. Chicago is a city filled with some of the most corruption and also some of the most courageous and successful organizing resistance overall. Chicago will always affect how I represent myself when I travel. It is home…”

Kristiana Rae Colón (1986) American poet and playwright

On her relationship to the city of Chicago in “Aprils Fools and Their Universe: Kristiana Rae Colón and #LetUsBreathe Collective” http://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/aprils-fools-and-their-universe-kristiana-rae-colon-and-letusbreathe-collective/ in Sixty (2018 Oct 30)

Vivek Agnihotri photo
Daniel Abraham photo

“Traveling between the planets had never eliminated murder. So many highly evolved primates in the same box for months on end, a certain death rate had to be expected.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 14 (p. 148)

Madeleine Thien photo

“It’s one of those places you can never quite see enough of it, it’s vast. For the Chinese it’s very odd for people to travel alone so I often get picked up by families and couples. You learn a lot from what people don’t tell you.”

Madeleine Thien (1974) Canadian writer

On her travels in China in “Madeleine Thien: ‘In China, you learn a lot from what people don’t tell you’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/08/madeleine-thien-interview-do-not-say-we-have-nothing in The Guardian (2016 Oct 8)

Milton Friedman photo
Jeanine Áñez photo

“So why fret and care that the actual version of the destined deed was done by an upper class English gentleman who had circumnavigated the globe as a vigorous youth, lost his dearest daughter and his waning faith at the same time, wrote the greatest treatise ever composed on the taxonomy of barnacles, and eventually grew a white beard, lived as a country squire just south of London, and never again traveled far enough even to cross the English Channel? We care for the same reason that we love okapis, delight in the fossil evidence of trilobites, and mourn the passage of the dodo. We care because the broad events that had to happen, happened to happen in a certain particular way.”

And something unspeakably holy—I don't know how else to say this—underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world and also, in realms of contingency, assured the minutiae of its construction in the manner we know, and not in any one of a trillion other ways, nearly all of which would not have included the evolution of a scribe to record the beauty, the cruelty, the fascination, and the mystery.
Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1342

Ariel Dorfman photo

“More than a traveler, I’m a displacer. In other words, I’m a person who is constantly meditating on what it means not to arrive at a place, but to be on my way somewhere else.”

Ariel Dorfman (1942) Chilean writer

On further elaborating on his point of being displaced in “Ariel Dorfman: 'Not to belong anywhere, to be displaced, is not a bad thing for a writer'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/09/ariel-dorfman-not-to-belong-anywhere-to-be-displaced-is-not-a-bad-thing-for-a-writer in The Guardian (2018 May 9)

Mahatma Gandhi photo
William Dalrymple photo

“He is one of Britain’s most successful travel writers, whose highly entertaining books elegantly combine scholarship and story-telling, trans-cultural investigations and romance.”

William Dalrymple (1965) author and historian

Jules Smith, in William Dalrymple: Critical Perspective http://literature.britishcouncil.org/william-dalrymple, 2007, British Council.
About William Dalrymple

Charles Webster Leadbeater photo
Michael Moorcock photo
Chiu Chui-cheng photo

“We will remind our (Republic of China) nationals that you may face potential risk if you travel to Hong Kong (if the extradition law of Hong Kong with Mainland China is passed). We (Mainland Affairs Council) may even issue a travel alert for Hong Kong.”

Chiu Chui-cheng politician

Chiu Chui-cheng (2019) cited in " Taiwan could issue travel alert for Hong Kong if proposed extradition update passes https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/03/25/taiwan-issue-travel-alert-hong-kong-proposed-extradition-update-passes/" on Hong Kong Free Press, 25 March 2019

“The mention made by Maulana Abdul Hai of Hindu temples turned into mosques, is only the tip of an iceberg, The iceberg itself lies submerged in the writings of medieval Muslim historians, accounts of foreign travellers and the reports of the Archaeological Survey of India. A hue and cry has been raised in the name of secularism and national integration whenever the iceberg has chanced to surface, inspite of hectic efforts to keep it suppressed. Marxist politicians masquerading as historians have been the major contributors to this conspiracy of silence.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

.... The vast cradle of Hindu culture is literally littered with ruins of temples and monasteries belonging to all sects of Sanatana Dharma - Buddhist, Jain, Saiva, Shakta, Vaishnava and the rest. ... The story of how Islamic invaders sought to destroy the very foundations of Hindu society and culture is long and extremely painful. It would certainly be better for everybody to forget the past, but for the prescriptions of Islamic theology which remain intact and make it obligatory for believers to destroy idols and idol temples.
Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990)

William H. Crogman photo
Rebecca Solnit photo
Vātsyāyana photo
Rukmini Devi Arundale photo
George Stephenson photo
Harvey Fierstein photo

“Psychologist Margaret Singer, 69, an outspoken Scientology critic and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, now travels regularly under an assumed name to avoid harassment.”

Margaret Singer (1921–2003) clinical psychology

Richard Behar, The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,972865-9,00.html, Time Magazine, May 6, 1991
About, Recognized expert

Tamsin Greig photo
Lil Wayne photo

“I’m strapped at home, strapped when I travel I pop my trunk and make these bitches spread like cattle.”

Lil Wayne (1982) American rapper, singer, record executive and businessman

King Kong
Official Mix tapes, Da Drought 3 (2007)

John Muir photo

“We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true; but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings — many of them not so much.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

" A Wind Storm in the Forests of the Yuba http://books.google.com/books?id=zj2gAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA55", Scribner's Monthly, volume XVII, number 1 (November 1878) pages 55-59 (at page 59); modified slightly and reprinted in The Mountains of California http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_mountains_of_california/ (1894), chapter 10: A Wind-Storm in the Forests
1890s, The Mountains of California (1894)

Prem Rawat photo
Joseph Campbell photo
Ernest Hemingway photo

“Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Letter (9 July 1950); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Fidel Castro photo
Ibn Taymiyyah photo

“What can my enemies do to me? I have in my breast both my heaven and my garden. If I travel they are with me, never leaving me. Imprisonment for me is a chance to be alone with my Lord. To be killed is martyrdom and to be exiled from my land is a spiritual journey.”

Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328) Sunni Islamic scholar and theologian, who lived during the era of the first Mamluks (1250-1328)

Ibn Taymiyyah, Diseases of the heart and their cures https://www.amazon.com/Diseases-Hearts-Their-Cures-Taymiyyah/dp/0953647633

Chen Shih-chung photo

“I want to advise everyone to wear a face mask at all times when travelling in an aircraft and also in confined spaces such as inside airports”

Chen Shih-chung politician

to protect oneself against COVID-19
Chen Shih-chung (2020) cited in " Taiwan says coronavirus couple likely infected on Hong Kong flight to Italy https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/wuhan-coronavirus-taiwan-couple-infected-hong-kong-flight-italy-12405134" on Channel News Asia, 7 February 2020.

Baruch Spinoza photo
Ram Prasad Bismil photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Isaac Asimov photo

“I don't believe in flying saucers... The energy requirements of interstellar travel are so great that it is inconceivable to me that any creatures piloting their ships across the vast depths of space would do so only in order to play games with us over a period of decades.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"On Flying Saucers" in Is Anyone There? (1967), pp. 215–216
General sources

Marion Koopmans photo
Halldór Laxness photo
Elizabeth Willing Powel photo

“I have certainly experienced severe trials, and some hard dispensations of Providence … To travel with some dignity, innocence, and usefulness, down the Road which leads from the Morning of Youth to the Night of the Grave, is perhaps as much as we can flatter ourselves with accomplishing.”

Elizabeth Willing Powel (1743–1830) American socialite and women letter writer

As quoted in [Maxey, David W., 2006, A Portrait of Elizabeth Willing Powel (1743–1830), https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/20020407, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, en, 63, 4, 10.2307/20020407, harv]

“It (travel restriction for the Chinese people due to the 2019-nCoV pandemic) has never been done before, there is no evidence this will do anything by shutting these people in. There is still the virus there.”

Ian Mackay (1922) Australian immunologist

Ian Mackay (2020) cited in: " The U.S. Scientist who Predicted Coronavirus could Kill 65 Million People–Three Months before the Outbreak in Wuhan, China https://electroverse.net/the-u-s-scientist-who-predicted-coronavirus-could-kill-65-million-people/" in Electroverse, 25 January 2020.

Haifaa al-Mansour photo

“Coming from that small town and watching films made me like travel in my space and appreciate being part of a bigger world and exercise emotions that you don't get to exercise when you are coming from a small town.”

Haifaa al-Mansour (1974) Saudi Arabian film director

Cinema Cafe at 2020 Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Institute - 31 Jan 2020, at 17 Min 50 Sec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwwCbpp_GkI

Tom Frieden photo

“This is the front line against terrible organisms. Like terrorism, you can’t fight it just within our borders. You’ve got to fight epidemic diseases where they emerge. [...] Either we help or hope we get lucky it isn’t an epidemic that travelers will catch or spread to our country.”

Tom Frieden (1960) American physician, President and Chief Executive Officer at Resolve to Save Lives

About the CDC downsizing its epidemic prevention. Quoted in CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/02/01/cdc-to-cut-by-80-percent-efforts-to-prevent-global-disease-outbreak/ (February 1, 2018) by Lena H. Sun, The Washington Post