Paul Fussell Quotes

I find nothing more depressing than optimism.

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

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.The explorer seeks theundiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history,the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity.If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.

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

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

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

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

A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.

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

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

Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travellers . . . seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.

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

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

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 we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.

The middles cleave to euphemisms not just because they're an aid in avoiding facts. They like them also because they assist their social yearnings towards pomposity. This is possible because most euphemisms permit the speaker to multiply syllables, and the middle class confuses sheer numerousness with weight and value.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

All the pathos and irony of leaving one's youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveller learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.