Daily Inspiration Quote by Joe Sacco

A journalist admitting he’s “not a good tourist” is a neat act of self-indictment: it flips a supposedly harmless identity into a moral problem. Joe Sacco isn’t complaining about museums or bad hotel wifi. He’s rejecting the posture tourism often demands - consumption without consequence, curiosity without accountability. In his line of work, the “tourist” is the person who arrives with a camera and a return ticket, harvesting other people’s reality as an experience. Sacco’s bluntness is a refusal of that extractive gaze.

The phrase works because it’s conversational and defensive at once. “Not a good tourist” sounds like a minor personal failing, the kind you’d confess over drinks. Then the second clause lands like a correction: it’s not that he fails at tourism; it’s that he dislikes the whole premise. That pivot exposes the ethical subtext: in conflict zones and occupied territories, being a visitor is never neutral. You either acknowledge the asymmetry - you can leave; others can’t - or you participate in it.

The context is Sacco’s larger project, which treats reporting as immersion rather than drive-by witnessing. His comics journalism is built on staying long enough to be uncomfortable, to be bored, to be implicated; tourism is designed to keep you entertained, moved, and safely untouched. The line is also a quiet warning to readers: if you’re consuming stories of suffering as “content,” you’re closer to the tourist than you think.