Mark Twain

“ The best class of our countrymen who go abroad keep us well posted about their doings in foreign lands, but their brethren vandals cannot sing their own praises or publish their adventures.
The American Vandal gallops over England, Scotland, Spain, and Switzerland, and finally brings up in Italy. He thinks it is the proper thing to visit Genoa, the stately old City of Palaces, whose vast marble edifices almost meet together over streets so narrow that three men can hardly walk abreast in them, and so crooked that a man generally comes out of them about the same place he went in. ”

“ You never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place ever since he was born and thought God made the world and dyspepsia and bile for his especial comfort and satisfaction. So I say, by all means let the American Vandal go on traveling, and let no man discourage him. ”

“ Cast into trouble and misfortune in strange lands and being mercifully cared for by those he never saw before, he begins to learn that best lesson of all -- that one which culminates in the conviction that God puts something good and something lovable in every man his hands create -- that the world is not a cold, harsh, cruel, prison-house, stocked with all manner of selfishness and hate and wickedness. ”

“ The Attic Plain is a mighty uncomfortable plain to travel in, even if it is so historical. The armed guards got after us three times and flourished their gleaming gun barrels in the moonlight, because they thought we were stealing grapes occasionally -- and the fact is we were -- for we found by and by that the brambles that tripped us up so often were grape-vines -- but these people in the country didn't know that we were quarantine-blockade runners, and so they only scared us and jawed Greek at us, and let us go, instead of arresting us. ”

“ If there is a moral to this lecture it is an injunction to all Vandals to travel. I am glad the American Vandal goes abroad. It does him good. It makes a better man of him. It rubs out a multitude of his old unworthy biases and prejudices. It aids his religion, for it enlarges his charity and his benevolence, it broadens his views of men and things ”

“ Contact with men of various nations and many creeds teaches him that there are other people in the world besides his own little clique, and other opinions as worthy of attention and respect as his own. ”

“ The guide showed us a coffee-colored piece of sculpture which he said was supposed to have come from the hand of Phidias, since it was not possible that any other man, of any epoch, could have copied nature with such faultless accuracy. The figure was that of a man without a skin; with every vein, artery, muscle, every fiber and tendon and tissue of the human frame, represented in minute detail. It looked natural, because it looked somehow as if it were in pain. A skinned man would be likely to look that way -- unless his attention were occupied by some other matter. ”