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 for….

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

Today the Somme is a peaceful but sullen place, unforgetting and unforgiving. ... To wander now over the fields destined to extrude their rusty metal….

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 r….

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 on….

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.The explorer seeks theundiscovered, the travel….

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

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

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

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..

There is no Apocalypse..

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

"Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice." ... They have experienced secretly and privately their natural human impu….

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present..

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 to….

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

And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach..

Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience..

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

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically d….