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January 07, 2003

Mark Twain on travel snobbery

"We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can 'show off' and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untravelled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off. …The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I have finished my own travels."
--Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)


Posted by Rolf on January 7, 2003 07:29 PM
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