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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I find nothing more depressing than optimism.