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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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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
Art
Rots
Past
Corrupts
Mind
Pretending
Thus
Tradition
Conscience
Present
Imagination
Shrivels

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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 balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.
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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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Most people who seek attention and regard by announcing that they're writing a novel are actually so devoid of narrative talent that they can't hold the attention of a dinner table for thirty seconds, even with a dirty joke.
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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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If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
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The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.
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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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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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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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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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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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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. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.
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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
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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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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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