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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
Going
Curmudgeon
World
Designated
Notices
Unpleasant
Anybody
Nice
Facts
Live

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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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Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
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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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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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Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
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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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The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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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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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 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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Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal 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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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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The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.
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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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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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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.
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The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.
Paul Fussell