Paul Fussell Quotes

Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.

The middles cleave to euphemisms not just because they're an aid in avoiding facts. They like them also because they assist their social yearnings towards pomposity. This is possible because most euphemisms permit the speaker to multiply syllables, and the middle class confuses sheer numerousness with weight and value.

The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.

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

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.

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.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.The explorer seeks theundiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history,the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity.If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates.

"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.

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.

What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.

If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.

Anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, . . . for if a traveler doesn't visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it.

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.

Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.

Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.

The worst thing about war was the sitting around and wondering what you were doing morally.

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.

Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.

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

I find nothing more depressing than optimism.

I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.

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.

Today the Somme is a peaceful but sullen place, unforgetting and unforgiving. ... To wander now over the fields destined to extrude their rusty metal fragments for centuries is to appreciate in the most intimate way the permanent reverberations of July, 1916. When the air is damp you can smell rusted iron everywhere, even though you see only wheat and barley.