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Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.

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
Experience
Truest
Ironic
Thus
Travel

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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
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Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
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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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Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
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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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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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The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.
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If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
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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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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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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.
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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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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.
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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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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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The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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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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Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
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