174 Quotes by Sebastian Junger

Bad news is dramatic. It makes good TV. If there’s a firefight on the same day that a school opens up, the media will show the firefight even though the school is way more important and will affect the community for much longer.

Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction – all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most.

There’s no reason to do anything twice, and certainly no reason to do something that almost killed you.

Women tend to act heroically within their own moral universe, regardless of whether anyone else knows about it – donating more kidneys to nonrelatives than men do, for example. Men, on the other hand, are far more likely to risk their lives at a moment’s notice, and that reaction is particularly strong when others are watching, or when they are part of a group.

If there’s an image of the apocalypse, I thought, it might be a man in a business suit building a fire in the courtyard of an abandoned high rise.

In some ways, risk-taking is the ultimate act of self-indulgence, an obscene insult to the preciousness of life. And yet, how can one dismiss something that persists despite every reasonable theory that it shouldn’t?

The problem is that it’s hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well.

You don’t owe your country nothing,” I remember him telling me. “You owe it something, and depending on what happens, you might owe it your life.

What would you risk dying for – and for whom – is perhaps the most profound question a person can ask themselves. The vast majority of people in modern society are able to pass their whole lives without ever having to answer that question, which is both an enormous blessing and a significant loss.