56 Quotes by Paul Fussell

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

i find nothing more depressing than optimism.

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

The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask tobe imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.

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.

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

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.

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

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.