174 Quotes by Sebastian Junger

How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?

An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain," one of the survivors wrote. "The equality of all men".

Most firefights go by so fast that acts of bravery or cowardice are more or less spontaneous. Soldiers might live the rest of their lives regretting a decision that they don’t even remember making; they might receive a medal for doing something that was over before they even knew they were doing it.

I came to think of it as a kind of zen practice: the Zen of not fucking up.

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.

Hierarchical male groups are good at mustering on the street and running into gunfire--another important task--but terrible at creating alliances.

...scripture: a true and honest accounting of everything that underlies the frantic performance of life.

Disasters, he proposed, create a "community of sufferers" that allow individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others

The coward’s fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others’ lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death. — J. Glenn Gary, The Warriors