Quote

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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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
Behind
Experienced
Privately
Around
Learned
Impulse
Secretly
Human
Somebody
Piano
Prospect
Humans
Nice
Killing
Brutality
Way
Secret
Merely
Wire
Enjoy
Kill
Neck
Noose
Learn
Toward
Necks
Nooses
Natural
Behinds
Fought
Sadism

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The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.
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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 I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
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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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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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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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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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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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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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The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
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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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Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.
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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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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
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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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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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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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The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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