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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.

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
War
Disproportionate
Means
Presumed
Ends
Constitutes
Mean
Ironic
Every
Irony
Expected
Worse
Situation

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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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If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
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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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Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
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Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
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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.
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Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.
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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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What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
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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.
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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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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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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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The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
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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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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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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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Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
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Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
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