Timothy Garton Ash Quotes

People who don't travel cannot have a global view, all they see is what's in front of them. Those people cannot accept new things because all they know is where they live.

No one's going to be able to operate without a grounding in the basic sciences. Language would be helpful, although English is becoming increasingly international. And travel. You have to have a global attitude.

Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.

We have a bad image in the world, I've got to admit. I just want people to think twice about Colombia. Don't go by the first impression.

The thing about American writers is that, as a group, they get stuck in the same idea: that we're a continent and the world falls away after us. And it's just nonsense.

I think America has a bad rap right now... and hopefully Obama will change that.

Anti-Americanism has been around as long as there has been an America.

World opinion is not the same thing as your own [country's] public opinion.

It's hard to be judgmental once you've been around the world... it's pretty hard to be anything but understanding, and I think it's good for everybody to get out and see someplace other than where you grew up.

I think going to another country and being able to evolve past my thinking and what actually went on in America was a little bit different from what athletes experience here in America.

It's important that we have a global perspective and look abroad and learn from our neighbors.

I don't know what politicians are like, but I imagine, having played one, that you have to have a really wide view of the world. You have to think globally; you can't think small.

Generally speaking, Rand Paul is been more wrong than right. He has an isolationist view of the world that I don't share.

A sad figure (Bush) ' not too well educated, who doesn't get out of America much. He's leading the country towards Fascism.

If you ask every American out there what kind of a people we are, we would all say, "Oh, we're really good people. We do good things in the world." Then you go around the world and ask what America is like, there's a completely different conceptualization of what we are.

My mission is to try to get a lot more global view.

I love that sometimes we need to go to the opposite side of the world to realize assumptions that we didn't even know we had and realize that the opposite may also be true.

So many Americans, for one reason or another, they watch the news and it doesn't really give them the idea of the world. Or they don't read or travel. They have no idea that America is part of the world and not the world itself.

You can have a lot of New York and still see what's going on in the rest of the world, I think - like in China.

The very fact of seeking specialization is probably what makes America so great in these two hundred years. But also, the sensation that somebody who wants to understand America doesn't really need to visit it much.

Thanks to Barack Obama, America is for the first time aligning its values with those of 'the majority of the world's population.' If you think the world's population has had better values than America, that is has made societies that are more open, free, and tolerant than American society, and that is has fought for others' liberty more than America has, you should be delighted.

It is rather the nature of America - our freewheeling, outspoken, prosperous, liberty-loving citizens extend equality to women, homosexuals, minorities, and almost anyone who comes to our shores, and thereby create desire and with it shame for that desire. Indeed, it is worse still than that: Precisely because we worry publicly that we are insensitive, our enemies scoff privately that we in fact are too sensitive - what we think is liberality and magnanimity they see as license and decadence. If we don't have confidence in who we are, why should they?

The spirit of seeking understanding through personal contact with people of other nations and other cultures deserves the respect and support of all.

According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.

That's something that I'm trying to do in my work, to send a message to western people. They're the ones who are completely disconnected.