Rick Steves Quotes

Travel is rich with learning opportunities, and the ultimate sourvenir is a broader perspective.

I shutter to think how many people are underexposed and lacking depth in this field.

Ideally, travel broadens our perspectives personally, culturally, and politically. Suddenly, the palette with which we paint the story of our lives has more colors.

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.

It's never too late to have a happy childhood, and age only matters if you're a cheese.

I travel around the world in a way that tries to open my mind and give me empathy and inspire me to come home and make this world a better place.

Travel like Ghandi, with simple clothes, open eyes and an uncluttered mind.

A society has to make a choice: tolerate alternative lifestyles or build more prisons.

By day, Venice is a city of museums and churches, packed with great art. Linger over lunch, trying to crack a crustacean with weird legs and antennae. At night, when the hordes of day-trippers have gone, another Venice appears. Dance across a floodlit square. Glide in a gondola through quiet canals while music echoes across the water. Pretend it's Carnevale time, don a mask - or just a fresh shirt - and become someone else for a night.

Be fanatically positive and militantly optimistic. If something is not to your liking, change your liking.

Travel is intensified living … and one of the last great sources of legal adventure.

As a traveler, I've often found that the more a culture differs from my own, the more I am struck by its essential humanity.

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.

I have used cannabis all over the world.

I have a New Year's tradition. I lay all my travel dreams on the table, sort them out, prioritize, and begin the process of turning those dreams into reality.

Even in challenging economic times, making sure that study abroad is part of our college students' education is a vital investment. If we want a new generation of leaders and innovators who can be effective in an ever more globalized world, sending our students overseas is not a luxury. It's a necessity.

I believe if you’re going to bomb someone you should know them first. It should hurt when you kill someone.

Like skiing with bent knees makes the moguls fun, you need to take risks, get out of your comfort zone, have a positive attitude, and enjoy the bumps in the road. I like to say that if things aren’t to your liking, change your liking.

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

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.

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.

I've got an efficiency and a guerrilla approach ... plus a unique synergy where everything I do helps everything else because it's overlapping.

I've traveled all over the country. Look at the East Coast. They just can't hardly believe how far along we are and in their world it feels like they're still behind. They're on the dark side of the moon.

I would like travelers, especially American travelers, to travel in a way that broadens their perspective.

We're still a racist country, but we've come a long way since the civil rights eras and we are still a homophobic country, but we've come a long way in that regard. And we still got a war on marijuana and have come along in that regard.

There's a huge difference between the more progressive and more regressive parts of America. That's just the way it is.

If you can get conservatives to sit down for 20 minutes and listen to you on drug policy reform you might have a good chance to - if not convert them - at least respect your opinion.

I think it will be pretty hard to deny the fact that prohibition of marijuana is on its way out.

Self-consciousness kills communication.

I believe, very strongly, that it is the responsible, adult, recreational, no apologies necessary, 'it just makes my music more fun,' recreational use of marijuana is a civil liberty.

I think that people don't realize that the sky will not fall when we legalize marijuana. My contention all along has been use will not go up when it's legalized. We'll just take the crime out of it. It's already a huge black market economy.

It's going to have to come to a point where politicians in their own political self-interest think it's safe and advantageous to come out on the side of drug law reform. Right now, they don't care about drug safety. They just care about their standing with the electorate.