“Whether we know it or not, we always approach the past with some preconceived ideas, with a rudimentary theory we wish to test. In this as in many other respects the cultural historian does not differ all that much from his predecessor, the traveller to foreign lands. Not the professional traveller who is only interested in one particular errand, be it the exploration of a country’s kinship system or its hydroelectric schemes, but the broad-minded traveller who wants to understand the culture of the country in which he finds himself.”

— Ernst Gombrich

In Search of Cultural History (1969)

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Ernst Gombrich 16

art historian 1909–2001

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990)

“Cultural imperialism involved, among many other things, exploration, missionary and humanitarian missions, travel, and the use of education and publishing to disseminate European ideas.”

George Ritzer (1940) American sociologist

Source: Globalization - A Basic Text (2010), Chapter 3, Related Processes I: Imperialism, Colonialism, and More, p. 67

“There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign”

Robert Louis Stevenson book The Silverado Squatters

The Silverado Squatters.
Context: There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear.

“A good traveler is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.”

Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 332

“I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in the country, such high moral values, people of such caliber, that I do not think we would conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

This quotation is commonly said to have been spoken by Macaulay during a speech to the British Parliament in 1835. Since Macaulay was in India at the time, it is more likely to have come from his Minute on Indian Education http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html. However, these words do not appear in that text. According to Koenraad Elst http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles/hinduism/macaulay.html, these words were printed in The Awakening Ray, Vol. 4, No. 5, published by the Gnostic Center, preceded by: "His words were to the effect." Burjor Avari cites this misattribution as an example of "tampering with historical evidence" in India: The Ancient Past ISBN 9780415356169, pp. 19–20), writes: "No proof of this statement has been found in any of the volumes containing the writings and speeches of Macaulay. In a journal in which the extract appeared, the writer did not reproduce the exact wording of the Minutes, but merely paraphrased them, using the qualifying phrase: ‘His words were to the effect.:’ This is extremely mischievous, as numerous interpretations can be drawn from the Minutes." For a full discussion, see Koenraad Elst, The Argumentative Hindu (2012) Chapter 3
Misattributed