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.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

I find nothing more depressing than optimism.

A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.

If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.

Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.

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