I would like travelers, especially American travelers, to travel in a way that broadens their perspective, because I think Americans tend to be some of the most ethnocentric people on the planet. It's not just Americans, it's the big countries. It's the biggest countries that tend to be ethnocentric or ugly. There are ugly Russians, ugly Germans, ugly Japanese and ugly Americans. You don't find ugly Belgians or ugly Bulgarians, they're just too small to think the world is their norm.

If you don't like a place, maybe you don't know enough about it... Give a culture the benefit of your open mind.

Fear is for people who don’t get out very much.

It's just in Washington we're talking about equal rights for gay people, civil liberty to smoke marijuana, taking care of the environment, and it's all just decency and common sense and patriotism. And in other parts of the country that would be, like, inconceivable.

Travel challenges truths that we were raised thinking were self-evident and God-given. Leaving home, we learn other people find different truths to be self-evident. We realize that it just makes sense to give everyone a little wiggle room.

Self-consciousness kills communication.

It seems that the most fearful people in our country are those who don't travel and are metaphorically barricaded in America. If we all stayed home and built more walls and fewer bridges between us and the rest of the world, eventually we would have something to actually be fearful of.