Simon Reeve > Quotes

“Try to drown the whispers in your head that are negative with the knowledge, with the stronger and louder certainty that you are wonderful, inspiring and interesting, both now and into your future.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“People don’t change when others tell them they should. People change when they tell themselves they must.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“Throughout history, malaria has been our greatest enemy. It’s thought that up to half of all the humans who have ever lived have died of malaria. Millions of Africans are still infected each year and thousands of children on the continent die every single day from the disease. The mosquito-borne virus is one of the great curses of the tropics, a disease found almost entirely between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. We might have forgotten about it in the temperate West, but in Africa especially it can still dominate life. I have been in some areas of Africa where the incidence of malaria is more than 200 per cent. How is that possible? People are infected more than once a year. How can”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“Often they can help to entrench poverty by encouraging people in remote communities empty of employment to do little but drink, fester and wait for the next handout from their relative abroad.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“A wandering minstrel came”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“Just make every sentence count.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“Then a senior KGB officer appeared and apologised for the misunderstanding. ‘Perhaps we can go for a drink to smooth this over,’ he suggested. We were all released into the night and agents gave each of us KGB cap badges as souvenirs.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“Their lesson was simple: our lives are nothing without our past, without our history, without our culture, without our culture and old stones. It all matters, because it gives meaning.”
― Simon Reeve, Journeys to Impossible Places

“I still cannot define a noun, let alone a definite or indefinite article, or an objective personal pronoun. I rely on spell-check to guide my use of ‘to’ or ‘too’. Does it matter? Colleagues said to me: ‘If you want to write, just get on and write. Don’t wait for a qualification.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“Small children in uniforms sang ‘our army is the best army’ with evident pride, and the army goose-stepped along the main road past a platform of officers awarded medals by the kilo.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“think the real Golden Age of travel is actually now, when it is cheaper and safer than ever. It’s also a guaranteed way of tingling your senses, enhancing your life and gifting you a huge stock of memories, encounters and experiences.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“a wonderful young honey-voiced woman called Batsola Andrianjaka, who explained why Madagascans do not fear death the way we do in the West. ‘This is a country where death is more important than life,’ she had told me. ‘Death is the chance for a humble human to become a powerful ancestor, someone respected and consulted by the living.”
― Simon Reeve, Journeys to Impossible Places: By the presenter of BBC TV's WILDERNESS

“My highs can be very high, but my lows are often still very low. I have never forgotten the feeling of the railings under my hands. The cold metal, the rush of traffic, the lorry horn. It is always within me. Always part of me. I was a slip away from tragedy. I know I am still.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“He had been on operations alongside his British counterparts and said that although American special forces teams had access to more resources, such as equipment, planes and satellites, the British were especially good because they endlessly ran through war-game scenarios. They practised, over and over. They prepared. ‘Then when it all goes south,’ said the American admiringly, ‘they really know what to do.”
― Simon Reeve, Journeys to Impossible Places: By the presenter of BBC TV's WILDERNESS

“Humans are just so damn complicated.”
― Simon Reeve, Journeys to Impossible Places: By the presenter of BBC TV's WILDERNESS

“boredom is key for developing our imagination. A child who is never bored has no space to dream, or to work up a solution to their predicament, and less reason to create.”
― Simon Reeve, Journeys to Impossible Places: By the presenter of BBC TV's WILDERNESS

“He kept telling James and me how proud he was of us. I reminded Dad how he had spotted the advert in the newspaper that kick-started my little journey. I made sure he knew that without his encouragement I would probably never have made anything of my life. I knew and I know he always loved me.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“I can remember everything about that moment because she gave me simple advice that guided me then, and still does to this day. ‘If it’s difficult for you,’ she said, ‘just take it all slowly. Take things step by step.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“As I left the Dayaks I felt torn. They had been endlessly welcoming to me, but they were also openly admitting involvement in, and responsibility for, mass killing. It reinforced what I had found during the previous decade, when I had been investigating terrorism, arms smuggling and organised crime, which was that situations are rarely clear-cut, hardly ever black and white, and good people can do bad things, while bad people can definitely do good. Humans are just so damn complicated.”
― Simon Reeve, Journeys to Impossible Places: By the presenter of BBC TV's WILDERNESS

“I looked forwards to the flight deck. The door was open and I could see the pilot and co-pilot toasting each other with glasses of vodka. In the context of where we were going, this felt completely normal.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“Critically, I realised that terrorists, who I had always imagined as horned devils, could be worryingly human.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“Never waste a meal eating something boring when you could be trying something exciting. That’s part of the joy of travel, because food is such a brilliant way of racking up great memories. And remember, it’s hardly ever going to kill you.”
― Simon Reeve, Journeys to Impossible Places: By the presenter of BBC TV's WILDERNESS

“I remember driving back from Portsmouth so tired that a voice in my head said I’ll just close my eyes until I get to the bridge ahead. The next thing I knew was the wheels rumbling over the cat’s eyes. I had tried to take a nap while driving. I’m not sure what Darwin would make of that.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“Marriage changed me. As it should. I signed myself up for a partnership.”
― Simon Reeve, Journeys to Impossible Places: By the presenter of BBC TV's WILDERNESS

“He spent ten minutes pointing out it was a miracle she was even going out with me. ‘Simon,’ he added at the end, ‘everyone should try to marry someone nicer than themselves.”
― Simon Reeve, Journeys to Impossible Places: By the presenter of BBC TV's WILDERNESS

“They were waving and chanting as we passed them, so I waved back. ‘They’re taunting you, Simon,’ said Emery, laughing. ‘What are they saying, then?’ ‘It’s a song. White man – your breath stinks.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“When it’s not a challenge I need to face, but something simply thrown at me by life, at a time when I have lost hope, perhaps when someone has died, I still use my step by step motto. Except I don’t head in a specific direction. I just try to do something – anything – and the sheer act of movement, in any direction, and the simple physicality of putting one foot in front of another starts to provide answers, solutions, and helps bring light into darkness.”
― Simon Reeve, Journeys to Impossible Places: By the presenter of BBC TV's WILDERNESS

“I was reminded of an African proverb: when two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”
― Simon Reeve, Journeys to Impossible Places: By the presenter of BBC TV's WILDERNESS

“By creating a park, and then providing jobs and salaries to local communities, we give economic incentives to people to protect what all of us surely want to preserve.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“My highs are possibly too high, just as my lows are probably too low. Yet I want to be affected by places and people and life and grief. That's the privilege of experiences. I want to be moved and touched and emotional. That's what makes me feel alive. That's why I adore adventures and need to travel.”
― Simon Reeve, Journeys to Impossible Places