Alex Berenson Quotes

An English man does not travel to see English men.

Why the hell do I want to go to a place like Mombassa?... I just see myself in a pot of boiling water with all these natives dancing around me.

You experience other cultures to give you a kind of shock that makes you look at your own culture. You appreciate it more as a result of being out of it, but you also realise there are some things lacking in your culture.

When you visit a foreign city you are in it, but not of it, separated by a glass wall. Once, while a student, I was getting dressed in my ground-floor room when a family of Italians crossed the grass to watch, as if I were laid on for their amusement and instruction.

You can feel as brave as Columbus starting for the unknown the first time you enter a Chinese lane full of boys laughing at you, or when you risk climbing down in a Tibetan pub for a meal of rotten meat.

When I was 20, I went to Paris and tried to meet French women. It didn't work.

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

I was afterwards sorry for this, though, if I ever travel again, I shall trust to none but natives, as the climate of Africa is too trying to foreigners.

In Europe, I am an outsider. I don't really understand anything that I am seeing. I can be welcomed into people's homes, I can be met with suspicion, I can be taken somewhere else altogether. There is always wonderment there for me, even if the person I am photographing may not see it or be aware of it.

When you go visiting countries, you start reading the history of the place and you start getting into the culture, and then you have to leave. In my experience, all countries have hidden treasures.

I'm a culture vulture, and I just want to experience it all.

Tell people you're a Canadian or a Kiwi when you travel and they'll adore you.

I thought I knew everything when I came to Rome, but I soon found I had everything to learn.

Everything in Asia is a culture shock, it's very different from North America, but it's great to be forced into a situation to meet new people and learn new techniques.

I always say the diversity, and culture is the one thing I love the most about the U.S. How you can travel across one borderline and you end up with this whole new set of people that I find super-interesting and great on tour.

Going to the U.A.E. for the first time was a real cultural shock. Everything was different. People didn't speak my language, it was all new, a huge change. But I loved it.

I'd never really travelled before, and when we started going places, like Japan, France, Germany and all over Europe, it's been interesting to see how different cultures work. But to be there playing music makes it so much better.

Going to Russia is going to be nothing for me. I'm going to treat it like it's the U.S. because, at the end of the day, it's one man, one ring.

I was with a Russian family, and I couldn't believe that the grandparents in Russia, first of all I was shocked and delighted to find that the Russian family that I'd been told was so different from the American family, was exactly the same.

Traveling has been a really big part of my upbringing and I've been fortunate enough to travel for different reasons. I'd like to think that it has had an impact on my character and personality, which ultimately affects my music.

Good travel books, like travel itself, open the door to new worlds. In the strongest works the author's vision becomes our own, especially if his or her subject is a distant destination.

There are so many American experiences that we can't know about unless we venture out to create a dialogue, to observe, ask questions, and stay there for a while.

I have always been intrigued by other cultures, and traveling to foreign lands has always been a part of my personal passion for learning about our world.

In European countries and some Asian countries I've been to, there's a lot less hesitation and skepticism when it comes to enjoying culture. People are encouraged to be fans and be passionate about what they like.

Even if Pearl S. Buck hadn't spent most of her life in China, she'd have every right to write about it.