A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.
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.
Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.
At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education.
Before tourism there was travel, and before travel there was exploration.
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.
Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
I find nothing more depressing than optimism.
If the term discussion has always seemed to me to imply mild warnings of wasted time, workshop sets off a clangorous alarm.
If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.
If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.
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.
The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.
The worst thing about war was the sitting around and wondering what you were doing morally.
Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.
Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.
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.
Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.
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