Paul Fussell Quotes

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.

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

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

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.

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

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

The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.

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

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

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.

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

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.