“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”
- Source
- The Innocents Abroad
- Date
- 1869
Meaning of “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness,…”
Twain closes the journey by arguing that sustained contact with unfamiliar people and places can challenge inherited assumptions and provincial judgments.
Where does it come from?
The Innocents Abroad (1869), Conclusion (Wikisource Chapter LXII). Twain argues from the completed excursion that travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness. Verified against the scan-backed 1869 first edition; this remains Twain’s nineteenth-century retrospective travel argument rather than a modern causal social-science finding.