Top 46 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Fussell

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American historian Paul Fussell.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Paul Fussell Jr. was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America's class system. Fussell served in the 103rd Infantry Division during World War II and was wounded in fighting in France. Returning to the US, Fussell wrote extensively and held several faculty positions, most prominently at Rutgers University (1955–1983) and at the University of Pennsylvania (1983–1994). He is best known for his writings about World War I and II, which explore what he felt was the gap between the romantic myth and reality of war; he made a "career out of refusing to disguise it or elevate it".

American - Historian | Born: March 22, 1924

Source: Wikipedia

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.

Paul Fussell

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

Paul Fussell

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

Paul Fussell

I find nothing more depressing than optimism.

Paul Fussell

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

Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.

Paul Fussell

There is no Apocalypse.

Paul Fussell

Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.

Paul Fussell

The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.

Paul Fussell

If the term discussion has always seemed to me to imply mild warnings of wasted time, workshop sets off a clangorous alarm.

Paul Fussell

Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.

Paul Fussell

A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.

Paul Fussell

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

Paul Fussell

"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

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

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

If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.

Paul Fussell

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

Paul Fussell

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

Paul Fussell

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.

Paul Fussell

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

Paul Fussell

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

Paul Fussell

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

Paul Fussell

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

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.

Paul Fussell

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.

Paul Fussell

Things without defense: insects, kittens, small boys.

Paul Fussell

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.

Paul Fussell

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

Paul Fussell

The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.

Paul Fussell

The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.

Paul Fussell

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

If the guidebook used to be critical, today it seems largely a celebratory adjunct to the publicity operations of hotels, resorts, and even countries.

Paul Fussell

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.

Paul Fussell

Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.

Paul Fussell

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.

Paul Fussell

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

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

To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.

Paul Fussell

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

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

Paul Fussell

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

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

Paul Fussell

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

Paul Fussell

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

All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel

Paul Fussell

Top 46 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Fussell

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