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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.

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
Past
Post
Without
Posts
Requires
Pulses
Pressure
Facto
Present
Illumination
Feeling
Exes
Understanding
Pulse
Feelings
Pretending

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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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If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
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The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.
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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.
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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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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.
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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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Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
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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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Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional 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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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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Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
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Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.
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What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
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