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
College
Automobile
Known
Status
World
Anxiety
Affiliations
People
University
Advertise
Car
Automobiles
Window
Affiliation
Americans
Rear
Whose
Prompts

More quotes by Paul Fussell

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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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What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
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If the term discussion has always seemed to me to imply mild warnings of wasted time, workshop sets off a clangorous alarm.
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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.
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The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.
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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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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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Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
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The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
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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.
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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice. ... They have experienced secretly and privately their natural human impulse toward sadism and brutality... Not merely did I learn to kill with a noose of piano wire put around somebody's neck from behind, but I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing that way.
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Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
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Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.
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Most people who seek attention and regard by announcing that they're writing a novel are actually so devoid of narrative talent that they can't hold the attention of a dinner table for thirty seconds, even with a dirty joke.
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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.
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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.
Paul Fussell
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The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
Paul Fussell
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Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.
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