Top 35 Paul Fussell Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Paul Fussell

Featured in: Travel Quotes

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

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

4. “There is no Apocalypse.”

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

6. “If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.”

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

8. “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

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.”

— Paul Fussell

10. “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

11. “Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.”

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

17. “What someone doesn’t want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.”

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

21. “Things without defense: insects, kittens, small boys.”

— Paul Fussell

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

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

— Paul Fussell

27. “I find nothing more depressing than optimism.”

— Paul Fussell

28. “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

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

— Paul Fussell

30. “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

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

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

35. “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

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

— Paul Fussell

37. “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

38. “Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.”

— Paul Fussell