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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.

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
Fought
War
Ends
Home
Reason

More quotes by Paul Fussell

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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.
Paul Fussell
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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.
Paul Fussell
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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.
Paul Fussell
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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
Paul Fussell
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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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A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.
Paul Fussell
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Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
Paul Fussell
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The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.
Paul Fussell
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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.
Paul Fussell
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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.
Paul Fussell
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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.
Paul Fussell
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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.
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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What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
Paul Fussell
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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.
Paul Fussell
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Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
Paul Fussell
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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.
Paul Fussell
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Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
Paul Fussell
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If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
Paul Fussell
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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
Paul Fussell