Maya Soetoro-Ng Quotes

You should be a person inside the world with knowledge of your terrain. And if you lock yourself into the 2,000-by-3,000-square-mile, lower-48 box of the United States, you're going to be frustrated by its limitations. You gotta think outside the box.

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

Traveling in Europe made me understand that America has an island mentality: No one exists except us. There's a whole other world out there, but most Americans - all they know is America, the marketing plan.

Travelling, in general, opens your mind to so many different cultures and different ways of thinking and different ways of seeing stuff. I definitely feel like it has an influence on my music to be a bit more broader and a bit more open.

I grew up in Africa surrounded by a lot of culture. It's made me aware that the world is a big place.

I get much more information about the rest of the world from people who are not Americans. You get a distance from America that is useful for a journalist; useful for my perspective on the world.

One of the advantages of travelling the world is that you get to know the world broadly. And one of the advantages of staying in one place is that you get to know the world deeply.

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.

I think my kids are pretty well-rounded citizens of the world.

I'm 'of the world'.

I have always thought that being a good American is appreciating the world, not just your own country.

I think it's important to look at the world as a bigger place than just the bubble that we live in. It's so easy to get caught up in things of a trivial nature.

Travel teaches tolerance.

I've seen the world and I've seen the bigger picture.

There is nothing obscure about the objectives of educational exchange. Its purpose is to acquaint Americans with the world as it is and to acquaint students and scholars from many lands with America as it is-not as we wish it were or as we might wish foreigners to see it, but exactly as it is-which by my reckoning is an "image" of which no American need be ashamed.

You have to realize there are other people, other economies, governments, cultures, religions, and destinies going on at the same time as yours. You have to widen the scope of your lens and start seeing more.

The sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence.

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.

Look, see, learn, become a citizen of Mankind, not just Hannibal, Missouri. That is the message of [Mark] Twain.

You cannot fully understand your own life without knowing and thinking beyond your life, your own neighborhood, and even your own nation.

The traveled mind is the catholic mind educated from exclusiveness and egotism.

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.

When you're educated, it allows you to be more worldly. It's more than just what happens in a classroom.

Not everybody gets to travel halfway around the world to see a whole different perspective. If we can see that on TV, we'll know that society is bigger than the small world we all live in.

I wholeheartedly believe that travel leads to open minds and contributes to a better cultural understanding and acceptance of people from around the world.