Quotes from Paul Fussell

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

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

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.

The day after the British entered the war Henry James wrote a friend: The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness... is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.

Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of judgement.

Today the Somme is a peaceful but sullen place, unforgetting and unforgiving. ... To wander now over the fields destined to extrude their rusty metal fragments for centuries is to appreciate in the most intimate way the permanent reverberations of July, 1916. When the air is damp you can smell rusted iron everywhere, even though you see only wheat and barley.

Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances.

I would read accounts of so-called battles I had been in, and they had no relation whatever to what had happened. So I began to perceive that anything written was fiction to various degrees. The whole subject-- the difference between actuality and representation--was an interesting one. And that's what brought me to literature in the first place.

So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us.Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy,the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.

When ... asked what I am writing, I have answered, "A book about social class in America," ... It is if I had said, "I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.

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

Another reason is that the letters are almost always funny, offering readers the spectacle of some pompous self-celebrator given ample ironic room in which to parade his self-solicited hurt.

Two motives urge fans to obsession with their sports. One is the need-—through the appeal of vicarious success—-to identify with winners. The other is to sanction, through pedantry, dogmatism, record-keeping, wise secret knowledge, and pseudo-scholarship, a claim to expertise on the subject. Sports give every man his opportunity to perform as a learned bore and to watch innumerable commentators on TV do the same.

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

Happy are those who can relieve suffering with prayer Happy those who can rely on God to see them through. They can wait patiently for the end. But we who have put our faith in the goodness of man and now see man's image debas'd lower than the wolf or the hog— Where can we turn for consolation? Owen

When the Allies bombed the Italians on the island of Pantelleria in June, 1943, General Spaatz, of the United States Air Corps, concluded that bombing "can reduce to the point of surrender any first-class nation now in existence, within six months.

The Duke of Windsor is there, together with such other losers as General Howard-Vyse and General Gamelin.14 All look entirely inadequate to the cynicism, efficiency, brutality, and bloody-mindedness that will be required to win the war. As

The Duke of Windsor is there, together with such other losers as General Howard-Vyse and General Gamelin.14 All look entirely inadequate to the cynicism, efficiency, brutality, and bloody-mindedness

and it is said that Waugh's witnessing numerous blunders and acts of overt cowardice there soured him permanently on the army, the war, and the pretense of high purpose claimed by both.

The confusions and delays prompted this graffito scrawled in the troop space of one of the transports: "Never in the history of human endeavour have so few been buggered about by so many" (495).

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected.