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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
Worse
Situation
War
Disproportionate
Means
Presumed
Ends
Constitutes
Mean
Ironic
Every
Irony
Expected
More quotes by Paul Fussell
The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.
Paul Fussell
Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
Paul Fussell
To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.
Paul Fussell
Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
Paul Fussell
The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.
Paul Fussell
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
If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
Paul Fussell
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.
Paul Fussell
What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
Paul Fussell
Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
Paul Fussell
If the term discussion has always seemed to me to imply mild warnings of wasted time, workshop sets off a clangorous alarm.
Paul Fussell
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.
Paul Fussell
A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.
Paul Fussell
If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
Paul Fussell
Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
Paul Fussell
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.
Paul Fussell
The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
Paul Fussell
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
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.
Paul Fussell
Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.
Paul Fussell
