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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.

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
Accurate
Lower
Measure
Size
Bigger
Class
Less
America

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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 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.
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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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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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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
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The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
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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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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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Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
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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 wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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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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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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If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
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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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Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
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