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

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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
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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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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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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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Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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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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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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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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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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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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And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.
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The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
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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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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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If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
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