45+ Paul Fussell Quotes On Education, Poetic Form And America

Paul Fussell was an American historian, literary critic, and scholar. He was best known for his writings on the First World War and the literature of the Great War. He was also well known for his books on class, taste, and manners in modern America. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Paul Fussell on leadership, education, life.

Top 10 Paul Fussell Quotes

1. Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
2. 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.
3. If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
4. I find nothing more depressing than optimism.
5. Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.
6. The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
7. 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.
8. Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.
9. 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.
10. I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.

Paul Fussell Short Quotes

• The worst thing about war was the sitting around and wondering what you were doing morally.
• Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
• Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
• Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.
• Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
• What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.
• To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.
• Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.
• The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.
• Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

Paul Fussell Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things without defense: insects, kittens, small boys. — Paul Fussell

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no Apocalypse. — 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

Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence. — Paul Fussell

Life Lessons by Paul Fussell

1. Paul Fussell teaches us to be critical of our own beliefs and to question the status quo, as well as to be open to learning from the experiences of others.
2. He also encourages us to be mindful of our own privilege and to use it to help those less fortunate.
3. Lastly, he reminds us to appreciate the beauty of life and to take time to enjoy the small moments.