174 Quotes by Sebastian Junger

I don’t think journalists in World War II were objective about the Nazis, and I don’t think they should have been.

I’ve stopped war reporting. I realized that I’d answered all of my questions about war and about myself.

People who do really dangerous tasks can’t afford to sit around and discuss the merits of what they’re doing.

The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it’s disconnected from just about everything. 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.

Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it.

I’m a good liberal, and I grew up in a very liberal family and had very strongly held beliefs.

It’s revealing, then, to look at modern society through the prism of more than a million years of human cooperation and resource sharing. Subsistence-level hunters aren’t necessarily more moral than other people; they just can’t get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny.

When you’re scared, you’re still hanging on to life. When you’re ready to die, you let it go. A sort of emptying out occurs, a giving up on the world that seems oddly familiar even if you’ve never done it before.

To make matters worse, politicians occasionally accuse rivals of deliberately trying to harm their own country – a charge so destructive to group unity that most past societies would probably have just punished it as a form of treason.