Quotes from Paul Fussell

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

i find nothing more depressing than optimism.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.

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

On one university campus there is a fifty-foot-tall pair of leaning tubes, ten feet in diameter, painted various shades of red and orange, and apparently struggling with each other. The maker has named it The Covenant. Students wisely call it Dueling Tampons.

Thus, BAD. The United States especially overflows with it because of all countries it is the most addicted to self-praise and complacency - even more than France.

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

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

Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.

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

i find nothing more depressing than optimism.

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.

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.

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

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