The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.

A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.

To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.The explorer seeks theundiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history,the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity.If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.

And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.