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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.

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
Unpleasant
Anybody
Nice
Facts
Live
Going
Curmudgeon
World
Designated
Notices

More quotes by Paul Fussell

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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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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
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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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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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If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
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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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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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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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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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Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
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The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
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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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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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The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.
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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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The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.
Paul Fussell
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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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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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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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Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
Paul Fussell