“Tyrants never like their subjects to travel: as long as there are no grounds of comparison, there is no basis from which to challenge the existing order. Anything that provides images of a different way of life poses a potential threat. The banning of travel goes hand in hand with the banning of books and the censorship of other sources of information. To invite the traveler to ‘examine the laws, manners and customs of different nations, and to compare them with those of your own’, or even just to ‘remove the prejudices of education’, is a risky undertaking.”
–Ian Littlewood, Sultry Climates (2001)

“To stop being a tourist, sometimes all you have to do is start standing still.”
–Taras Grescoe, End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists (2003)

“Vagabonding is not like bulk shopping: The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home — and the slow, nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.”
–Rolf Potts, Vagabonding (2003)

“There are deeper reasons to travel — itches and tickles on the underbelly of the unconscious mind. We go where we need to go, and then try to figure out what we’re doing there.”
–Jeff Greenwald, Shopping for Buddhas (1990)

“If every journey makes us wiser about the world, it also returns us to a sort of childhood. In alien parts, we speak more simply, in our own or some other language, more freely, unencumbered by the histories that we carry around at home, and look more excitedly, with eyes of wonder.”
–Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu (1988)

“I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will / not run to that easy victory: / still around the looser, wider forces at work: / I will try / to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening / scope, but enjoying the freedom that / Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision, / that I have perceived nothing completely, / that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.”
–A.R. Ammons, “Corson’s Inlet” (1965)

“Boredom greases the cogs in the machinery of marvels. Oh, God, will you be bored. The three days waiting for an Indonesian bureaucrat to issue you a travel permit; the rock slide in Costa Rica that caused a twenty-three-hour traffic jam; the five-day wait for the Congo River passenger barge; the eight sweaty hours spent in the transit lounge of the Bujumbara airport, waiting for crews to clean up the wreckage of the last plane that tried to land in Kigali. Boring. Bring along a big book. This is your chance to finally finish War and Peace. And remember — while you’re plowing through Andrey’s interminable conversations with Karatayev — that boredom is often the price we pay for marvels.”
–Tim Cahill, Hold the Enlightenment (2002)

“Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social scale. It displaces us physically and also — for better or worse — takes us out of our class context, so that the color and flavor of certain places cannot de dissociated from the always unexpected social level on which we find ourselves in experiencing them.”
–Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955)

“A foreigner tends to see paradise where a native sees purgatory, insofar as a foreigner is in a privileged position and has more appreciative eyes, undimmed by familiarity.”
–Pico Iyer, from a Powells.com interview, 2000

“Are we correct that all cultural values are being destroyed? Or are they once again changing, under the press of circumstance and from their own internal dynamics, while we, the anthropologists, disapprove of the changes or at least do not comprehend them? To argue globally against cultural change is a startling position; to accept all change as good is mindless and cruel. The challenge, as yet unmet, is to conceptualize communities as a complex process of stability and change, and then to factor in the changes tourism brings. To this end, the evaluation of tourism cannot be accomplished by measuring the impact of tourism against a static background. Some of what we see as destruction is construction. Some is the result of a lack of any other viable option; and some the result of choices that could be made differently. Which is which is by no means an easy matter to decide, but is clear that anthropologists have not yet met these problems head on.”
–Davydd J. Greenwood, from Valene Smith’s Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism (1977)