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.

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

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

Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.

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.

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

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