Top 120 Sebastian Junger Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The only thing that makes battle psychologically tolerable is the brotherhood among soldiers. You need each other to get by.”

— Sebastian Junger

2. “Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It’s time for that to end.”

— Sebastian Junger

3. “Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.”

— Sebastian Junger

4. “If you get an infection, you get a fever; the fever is your body dealing with the infection. If you get traumatized, your mind and your brain have a reaction to that trauma. If you’re not dreaming about it, something’s probably wrong.”

— Sebastian Junger

5. “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. – Winston Churchill.”

— Sebastian Junger

6. “Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.”

— Sebastian Junger

7. “The findings are in keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money, and status. Bluntly.”

— Sebastian Junger

8. “War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.”

— Sebastian Junger

9. “The cause doesn’t have to be righteous and battle doesn’t have to be winnable; but over and over again throughout history, men have chosen to die in battle with their friends rather than to flee on their own and survive.”

— Sebastian Junger

10. “When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don’t see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you’re walking in.”

— Sebastian Junger

11. “Who wants a life of ease? And who wants a life in the office that you hate, and who wants to play golf?”

— Sebastian Junger

12. “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.”

— Sebastian Junger

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

— Sebastian Junger

14. “Of the primary emotions, fear is the one that bears most directly on survival. Children show fear. Adults try not to, maybe because it’s shameful, or, in some circumstances, dangerous. The fear response is automatic, though, and your body runs through its reflexes whether you want it to or not.”

— Sebastian Junger

15. “In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. That is a great blessing but allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all – rationing water during a drought, for example – are forms of government tyranny. They are no more forms of tyranny than rationing water on a lifeboat. The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.”

— Sebastian Junger

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

— Sebastian Junger

17. “I hope I get married one day.”

— Sebastian Junger

18. “My wife, Daniela, and I live in an old house from 1810 with three fireplaces at the end of a dead-end dirt road on Cape Cod, so I turn the trees into firewood for us and a friend of mine sells the rest.”

— Sebastian Junger

19. “How do you become an adult in a society that doesn’t ask for sacrifice? How do you become a man in a world that doesn’t require courage?”

— Sebastian Junger

20. “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.”

— Sebastian Junger

21. “No matter how many people you kill, using a machine gun in battle is not a war crime because it does not cause unnecessary suffering; it simply performs its job horrifyingly well.”

— Sebastian Junger

22. “The army consists of the first infantry division and eight million replacements.”

— Sebastian Junger

23. “The beauty and the tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good.”

— Sebastian Junger

24. “A SOFT fall rain slips down through the trees and the smell of ocean is so strong that it can almost be licked off the air.”

— Sebastian Junger

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

— Sebastian Junger

26. “A grenade launcher will easily take out a tank; a Molotov cocktail placed in its air intake will destroy one as well.”

— Sebastian Junger

27. “Combat isn’t where you might die – though that does happen – it’s where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don’t underestimate the power of that revelation. Don’t underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time.”

— Sebastian Junger

28. “PTSD is a disorder of recovery, and if treatment only focuses on identifying symptoms, it pathologizes and alienates vets. But if the focus is on family and community, it puts them in a situation of collective healing.” Israel.”

— Sebastian Junger

29. “There are houses in Gloucester where grooves have been worn into the floorboards by women pacing past an upstairs window, looking out to sea.”

— Sebastian Junger

30. “Firemen don’t talk about whether a burning warehouse is worth saving.”

— Sebastian Junger

31. “Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy of its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long. The.”

— Sebastian Junger

32. “As modern society reduced the role of community, it simultaneously elevated the role of authority.”

— Sebastian Junger

33. “If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different – you underscore your shared humanity,” she told me. “I’m appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?” The.”

— Sebastian Junger

34. “I think, unfortunately, we live in a world where people attack other people and I think a legitimate rationale for war is the saving of human life, the saving of lives of people who cannot defend themselves.”

— Sebastian Junger

35. “Traditional Albanian society was based on a clan system and was further divided into brotherhoods and bajraks. The bajrak system identified a local leader, called a bajrakar, who could be counted on to provide a certain number of men for military duty.”

— Sebastian Junger

36. “But in any society, leaders who aren’t willing to make sacrifices aren’t leaders, they’re opportunists, and opportunists rarely have the common good in mind. They’re easy to spot, though: opportunists lie reflexively, blame others for failures, and are unapologetic cowards.”

— Sebastian Junger

37. “I think objectivity is like this strange myth that people think you’re supposed to achieve, but actually, the dirty little secret is that it’s not attainable any more than pure justice is attainable by the courts.”

— Sebastian Junger

38. “An adventure is a situation where the outcome is not entirely within your control. It is up to fate, in other words.”

— Sebastian Junger

39. “Brotherhood has nothing to do with feelings; it has to do with how you define your relationship to others. It has to do with the rather profound decision to put the welfare of the group above your personal welfare. In such a system, feelings are meaningless. In such a system, who you are entirely depends on your willingness to surrender who you are.”

— Sebastian Junger

40. “As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down. Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in a society seems to foster it. Suicide.”

— Sebastian Junger

41. “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.”

— Sebastian Junger

42. “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.”

— Sebastian Junger

43. “Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples.”

— Sebastian Junger

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

— Sebastian Junger

45. “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.”

— Sebastian Junger

46. “Civilians understand soldiers to have a kind of baseline duty, and that everything above that is considered “bravery.” Soldiers see it the other way around: either you’re doing your duty or you’re a coward.”

— Sebastian Junger

47. “Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

— Sebastian Junger

48. “Western society is so unappealing. On a material level, it is clearly more comfortable and protected from the hardships of the natural world. But, as societies become more affluent they tend to require more, rather than less, time and commitment by the individual, and it’s possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren’t a good trade for freedom.”

— Sebastian Junger

49. “As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down.”

— Sebastian Junger

50. “The United States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be the United States herself, which means that the ultimate terrorist strategy would be to just leave the country alone. That way, America’s ugliest partisan tendencies could emerge unimpeded by the unifying effects of war. The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn’t acting competitively – that should be encouraged – but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group.”

— Sebastian Junger