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Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.

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
Travel
Age
Moment
Proletarian
Moments
Tourism
Renaissance
Bourgeois
Exploration
Belongs

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The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.
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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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Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
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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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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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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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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
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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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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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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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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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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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The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
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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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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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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.
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What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
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