Love Quote by Robert Fulghum

Fulghum’s jab at “tourists who ride by in a bus clucking their tongues” isn’t really about travel; it’s a demolition of the safe, spectator posture that modern life practically sells us as a lifestyle. The image is perfectly petty and precise: sealed behind glass, consuming other people’s reality like scenery, performing moral disapproval (“clucking”) without paying any cost. It’s compassion with the hazard removed.

The subtext is a critique of detached righteousness. The tourist doesn’t just fail to help; they turn the world’s mess into a fleeting anecdote, a thing to remark upon before moving on. Fulghum frames that as useless at best, parasitic at worst. The bus becomes a metaphor for distance: privilege, insulation, and the fantasy that noticing counts as engagement.

Then he pivots to a harder, more bracing ethic: “love it enough to change it.” Not rage, not contempt, not the cheap dopamine of critique. Love, here, isn’t sentimental; it’s an obligation. He tightens the screws with “with what they have, where they are,” a line that quietly rejects the classic alibis: I’m not ready, I don’t have resources, I’m not important, I’ll start later. It’s an anti-heroic call to local agency.

Contextually, this fits Fulghum’s broader project as a plainspoken moralist: he uses everyday imagery to smuggle in demanding civic instruction. The quote works because it flatters no one. It tells the comfortable observer that the world doesn’t need their commentary; it needs their participation.