Paul Fussell Quotes

Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.

If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.

i find nothing more depressing than optimism.

A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.

Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.

The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.

Anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, . . . for if a traveler doesn't visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it.

Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and it's fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment.

Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.

Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.

All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel

I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.

The worst thing about war was the sitting around and wondering what you were doing morally.

Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.

Things without defense: insects, kittens, small boys.

The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.

Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.

Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.

The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.

There is no Apocalypse.

And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.

To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.

The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.

If the term discussion has always seemed to me to imply mild warnings of wasted time, workshop sets off a clangorous alarm.

What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

If the guidebook used to be critical, today it seems largely a celebratory adjunct to the publicity operations of hotels, resorts, and even countries.

The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.

If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.

The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask tobe imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.