Quote

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.

Paul Fussell

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Paul Fussell
Age: 88 †
Born: 1924
Born: March 22
Died: 2012
Died: May 23
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Military Historian
University Teacher
Writer
Pasadena
California
Known
Status
World
Anxiety
Affiliations
People
University
Advertise
Car
Automobiles
Window
Affiliation
Americans
Rear
Whose
Prompts
College
Automobile

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The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.
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If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
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A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.
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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.
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Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
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If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
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What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
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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.
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Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
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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.
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Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
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