Politics & Power Quote by Anita Loos

Leave it to Anita Loos to make a line about travel sound like a compliment while quietly turning the knife. On the surface, she’s praising that cozy thrill of recognition abroad: you cross an ocean, change currencies, mangle a menu, and then - relief - an American voice cuts through the air like a familiar radio station. But Loos was a writer with a calibrated ear for social comedy, and the sentence is built like one of her best punchlines: the “delight” of traveling is not discovery, it’s reassurance.

The repetition of “always” does the real work. It’s not a one-off coincidence; it’s a habit, a dependence. Travel becomes less an encounter with otherness than a mobile extension of home, a way to collect the feeling of sophistication without paying the price of disorientation. The subtext is a send-up of the American tourist as a person who wants the world, but on American terms: foreign scenery with domestic comfort, novelty with guardrails.

Loos wrote in a period when American money and cultural confidence were increasingly portable, when transatlantic travel was glamorous but also a stage for national self-regard. Her wit catches the paradox of cosmopolitanism as performance. You can claim you’ve “traveled” while spending the whole trip looking for your own reflection - in accents, manners, and the reassuring notion that wherever you go, you’re still the center of the story.