Life & Wisdom Quote by Clifton Paul Fadiman

The line lands with the polite sting of a seasoned cosmopolitan correcting a tourist mid-complaint. Fadiman, a writer and public intellectual who made a career out of translating culture for general audiences, aims this sentence at the most common travel delusion: that the world is a service industry with your preferences at the center. By framing a “foreign country” as something “designed,” he borrows the language of planning and architecture to expose an entitlement most travelers don’t think of as ideological. Comfort, he implies, isn’t a neutral expectation; it’s a demand for the host society to reorganize itself around you.

The subtext is a critique of soft imperial habits. Even without armies or flags, tourists can act like minor colonizers: irritated by different meal times, offended by unfamiliar manners, treating language barriers as customer-service failures. Fadiman’s reversal - their comfort, not yours - flips the usual travel narrative from “What can I get?” to “What am I walking into?” It’s less about self-denial than recalibration: if you’re uncomfortable, that discomfort may be information, not an emergency.

Context matters here. Fadiman wrote in a century when mass tourism expanded alongside American and European cultural confidence. The quote reads like an antidote to the postwar traveler’s assumption that modernity should look the same everywhere. It also anticipates today’s debates about overtourism and “authenticity”: places don’t exist to perform themselves for visitors. The real sophistication in travel, Fadiman suggests, is accepting you are not the default setting.