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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.

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
Forms
Travelers
Humility
Cuisine
Lucky
Unfamiliar
Novel
Traveler
Belief
Customs
Learn
Beliefs
Form
Foreign
Government
Curious
Cuisines

More quotes by Paul Fussell

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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 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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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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The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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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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What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
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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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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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Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
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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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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 at its truest is thus an ironic experience.
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The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
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Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
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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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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
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The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.
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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.
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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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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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