Paul Fussell > Quotes

“i find nothing more depressing than optimism.”
― Paul Fussell

“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, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System

“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, The Great War and Modern Memory

“If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

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

“The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower your class.
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― Paul Fussell

“Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.”
― Paul Fussell

“If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.”
― Paul Fussell

“The day after the British entered the war Henry James wrote a friend:

The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness... is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“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, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“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, The Great War and Modern Memory

“Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of judgement.”
― paul fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars

“Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“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, Thank God for the Atom Bomb & Other Essays

“I would read accounts of so-called battles I had been in, and they had no relation whatever to what had happened. So I began to perceive that anything written was fiction to various degrees. The whole subject-- the difference between actuality and representation--was an interesting one. And that's what brought me to literature in the first place.”
― Paul Fussell

“Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“When ... asked what I am writing, I have answered, "A book about social class in America," ... It is if I had said, "I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.”
― Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System

“Two motives urge fans to obsession with their sports. One is the need-—through the appeal of vicarious success—-to identify with winners. The other is to sanction, through pedantry, dogmatism, record-keeping, wise secret knowledge, and pseudo-scholarship, a claim to expertise on the subject. Sports give every man his opportunity to perform as a learned bore and to watch innumerable commentators on TV do the same.”
― Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System

“In war it is not just the weak soldiers, or the sensitive ones, or the highly imaginative or cowardly ones, who will break down. Inevitably, all will break down if in combat long enough […] As medical observers have reported, “There is no such thing as ‘getting used to combat’ … Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their experience.” Thus – and this is unequivocal: ‘Psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“Another reason is that the letters are almost always funny, offering readers the spectacle of some pompous self-celebrator given ample ironic room in which to parade his self-solicited hurt.”
― Paul Fussell

“The implicit optimism of the [field service post card] is worth noting—the way it offers no provision for transmitting news like “I have lost my left leg” or “I have been admitted into hospital wounded and do not expect to recover.” Because it provided no way of saying “I am going up the line again,” its users had to improvise. Wilfred Owen had an understanding with his mother that when he used a double line to cross out “I am being sent down to the base,” he meant he was at the front again. Close to brilliant is the way the post card allows one to admit to no state of health between being “quite” well, on the one hand, and, on the other, being so sick that one is in hospital.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“Happy are those who can relieve suffering with prayer Happy those who can rely on God to see them through. They can wait patiently for the end. But we who have put our faith in the goodness of man and now see man’s image debas’d lower than the wolf or the hog— Where can we turn for consolation? Owen”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to be imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.”
― Paul Fussell

“I jumped into a car with orders to find out what was causing the stoppage in front.… As soon as I got near [Albert] I began to see curious sights. Strange figures, which looked very little like soldiers, and certainly showed no sign of advancing, were making their way back out of the town. There were men driving cows before them …; others who carried a hen under one arm and a box of notepaper under the other. Men carrying a bottle of wine under their arm and another one open in their hand. Men who had torn a silk drawing-room curtain from off its rods and were dragging it to the rear. … More men with writing-paper and colored note-books.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“On one university campus there is a fifty-foot-tall pair of leaning tubes, ten feet in diameter, painted various shades of red and orange, and apparently struggling with each other. The maker has named it The Covenant. Students wisely call it Dueling Tampons.”
― Paul Fussell, Bad, or the Dumbing of America

“The Duke of Windsor is there, together with such other losers as General Howard-Vyse and General Gamelin.14 All look entirely inadequate to the cynicism, efficiency, brutality, and bloody-mindedness that will be required to win the war. As”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“The same tricks of publicity and advertising might have succeeded in sweetening the actualities of Vietnam if television and a vigorous uncensored moral journalism hadn’t been brought to bear. America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like and has thus been unable to use such understanding to re-interpret and re-define the national reality and to arrive at something like public maturity.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“Bullheaded as he was, he was the perfect commander for an enterprise committed to endless abortive assaulting. Indeed, one powerful legacy of Haig’s performance is the conviction among the imaginative and intelligent today of the unredeemable defectiveness of all civil and military leaders. Haig could be said to have established the paradigm.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“When the Allies bombed the Italians on the island of Pantelleria in June, 1943, General Spaatz, of the United States Air Corps, concluded that bombing “can reduce to the point of surrender any first-class nation now in existence, within six months.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War