Step by Step 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

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

“In that moment, I knew I never wanted to stop travelling, and discovering. I knew that for as long as I could I needed to use each journey to enrich my mind, heart and life. I would take chances, go to strange places, and dive into the culture of the world. And I would never take it for granted.”
― Simon Reeve, Step by Step: The Life In My Journeys

“When you're a youngster struggling to come to terms with life, it's easy to fall into a trough of despair. But if you can pick yourself up just enough to take a few initial steps, sometimes, just maybe, you can start to climb out of your situation. Life advice often consists of people saying you should 'aim for the stars' and plan where you want to be in a year or even five years, but for me that was completely unrealistic. I could hardly see beyond the end of each day. So I set much smaller goals. It worked for me. I had climbed a mountain and my life began to improve.”
― Simon Reeve, Step by Step: The Life In My Journeys

“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

“He nodded. ‘We can circumcise a hundred boys an hour.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“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

“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

“We are often sold a vision of the world as a dangerous and frightening place. In reality the world is friendly and astonishingly hospitable.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“More of us should try turning a break into a proper adventure with a healthy dose of purpose and meaning. It almost guarantees a lifetime of memories. You could follow a river from source to sea or start a trip in one location and then head to another, exploring along the way.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“Despite the willingness of people in Nagorno-Karabkh to wander through minefields, they seemed to be a surprisingly long-lived people.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

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

“We stopped to grab something to eat in a wooden hut of a café that, at one time, had been a brothel. A wandering minstrel came in to sing us a melancholy song. He explained it was about the homeland he had lost and longed for. The emotion was heartfelt.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“A local scientist, who had taken it upon himself to rally some help from other retired experts and deactivate some of the weaponry, showed me into a corrugated-iron shed, locked by a single piece of string, inside which were 30,000 rusting shells still containing the military high-explosive TNT.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“When our local guide vanished I was able to sit on Stalin’s personal toilet and strike my own small blow against the veneration of a murdering madman.”
― 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

“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

“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

“The International Organisation on Migration (IOM) has concluded there are more Ethiopian doctors working in Chicago than in the whole of Ethiopia. One study found that an astonishing 77 per cent of physicians trained in Liberia were actually working in the US.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“In their place the Americans arrived, and NASA decided to use the airfield as an emergency landing strip for the space shuttle, apparently paying something like £30 million per year in rent. Yusuf could see that I looked completely disbelieving. ‘It’s true!’ he said with a smile. ‘It was just in case the shuttle had trouble on re-entry and couldn’t make it around the planet and back to the US. You see, we have more surprises to share with you, Simon.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“He charged me about £50 and in fifteen minutes I had a genuine Somali diplomatic passport, bearing my own name and photograph. No checks, no birth certificate, of course. I still have the passport, and it remains one of my strangest travel souvenirs.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“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

“I also try to use a technique that has worked well for me in relationships: if someone believes really strongly that we should do something, whether it’s the assistant producer or the executive in charge, we generally do it. Enthusiasm trumps apathy.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“Careful planning and preparation guarantees powerful experiences.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“You can start locally. Upturn a glass on a map and centre it on your home. Then draw a ring around the rim and explore that circle so you know it like the back of your hand. All travel gifts memories, and spontaneity has a place.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“She was opinionated, thoughtful and funny, telling tales about a horrific shoot she abandoned when a producer started gluing stick insects to a branch in a garage in Croydon.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“If pre-warned perhaps I could have used the tactic of a former KGB officer I once knew. He claimed he would swallow handfuls of lard before boozy meetings with crucial contacts, because the fat would line his stomach, prevent absorption of alcohol, and keep him sharp and focused. This is still not to be recommended.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step

“Three times during our talk the militant said he wanted to martyr himself against the West, making Kadyr nervous he was about to blow himself up in our van.”
― Simon Reeve, Step By Step