Quote

A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.

Paul Fussell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
America
Accurate
Lower
Measure
Size
Bigger
Class
Less

More quotes by Paul Fussell

Image
And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.
Paul Fussell
Image
Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
Paul Fussell
Image
Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.
Paul Fussell
Image
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.
Paul Fussell
Image
What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
Paul Fussell
Image
Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
Paul Fussell
Image
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.
Paul Fussell
Image
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
Image
To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.
Paul Fussell
Image
The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.
Paul Fussell
Image
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.
Paul Fussell
Image
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
Image
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.
Paul Fussell
Image
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.
Paul Fussell
Image
Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
Paul Fussell
Image
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
Image
Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.
Paul Fussell
Image
Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
Paul Fussell
Image
If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
Paul Fussell
Image
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.
Paul Fussell