Top 120 Sebastian Junger Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “It may be worth considering whether middle-class American life – for all its material good fortune – has lost some essential sense of unity that might otherwise discourage alienated men from turning apocalyptically violent.”

— Sebastian Junger

53. “Disasters, he proposed, create a “community of sufferers” that allow individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others.”

— Sebastian Junger

54. “Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker.”

— Sebastian Junger

55. “As the helicopter fell, its dead rotors started to spin, and Ruvola used that energy to slow the aircraft down. Like downshifting a car on a hill, a hovering auto-rotation is a way of dissipating the force of gravity by feeding it back through the engine. By the time the helicopter hit the water it had slowed to a manageable speed, and all the torque had been bled out of the rotors;.”

— Sebastian Junger

56. “If contemporary America doesn’t develop ways to publicly confront the emotional consequences of war, those consequences will continue to burn a hole through the vets themselves. I.”

— Sebastian Junger

57. “In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.” The.”

— Sebastian Junger

58. “I was surprised how open and unguarded the military was. I expected more scrutiny, more supervision from command.”

— Sebastian Junger

59. “It’s fun to have money, but the more money I get, the less interesting it becomes. If you don’t have very much, you have to think about it. If you are starving, you become interested in food. If you are struggling to pay the bills, money becomes tragically important.”

— Sebastian Junger

60. “It makes absolutely no sense to make sacrifices for a group that, itself, isn’t willing to make sacrifices for you.”

— Sebastian Junger

61. “It’s hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary.”

— Sebastian Junger

62. “The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs – and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought – will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.”

— Sebastian Junger

63. “Adversity often leads people to depend more on one another, and that closeness can produce a kind of nostalgia for the hard times that even civilians are susceptible to.”

— Sebastian Junger

64. “If you shell a military base and happen to kill civilians, you have not committed a war crime; if you deliberately target cities and towns, you have.”

— Sebastian Junger

65. “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.”

— Sebastian Junger

66. “When a person does something for another person – a prosocial act, as it’s called – they are rewarded not only by group approval but also by an increase of dopamine and other pleasurable hormones in their blood. Group cooperation triggers higher levels of oxytocin, for example, which promotes everything from breast-feeding in women to higher levels of trust and group bonding in men.”

— Sebastian Junger

67. “All journalists hope that their work will inspire a broader conversation. I think that’s just what journalism is.”

— Sebastian Junger

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

— Sebastian Junger

69. “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.”

— Sebastian Junger

70. “Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up. War is so obviously evil and wrong that the idea there could be anything good to it almost feels like a profanity.”

— Sebastian Junger

71. “At 19, your brain hasn’t finished wiring itself. So the first time you have a good friend die, most people don’t go through that at 19. Soldiers do. They’re facing life in this accelerated, compressed form, and a lot of times, they’re not ready for it.”

— Sebastian Junger

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

— Sebastian Junger

73. “So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself?”

— Sebastian Junger

74. “A wealthy person who never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading a privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience. Financial independence can lead to isolation, and isolation can put people at a greatly increased risk of depression and suicide. This might be a fair trade for a generally wealthier society- but a trade it is.”

— Sebastian Junger

75. “Industrial production actually rose in Germany during the war. And the cities with the highest morale were the ones – like Dresden – that were bombed the hardest. According to German psychologists who compared notes with their American counterparts after the war, it was the untouched cities where civilian morale suffered the most.”

— Sebastian Junger

76. “Given the profound alienation of modern society, when combat vets say that they miss the war, they might be having an entirely healthy response to life back home. Iroquois warriors did not have to struggle with that sort of alienation because warfare and society existed in such close proximity that there was effectively no transition from one to the other.”

— Sebastian Junger

77. “A rampage shooting has never happened in an urban ghetto, for example; in fact, indiscriminate attacks at schools almost always occur in otherwise safe, predominantly white towns. Around half of rampage killings happen in affluent or upper-middle-class communities, and the rest tend to happen in rural towns that are majority-white, Christian, and low-crime.”

— Sebastian Junger

78. “We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is to an extremely narrow group of people: our children, our spouse, maybe our parents. Our society is alienating, technical, cold, and mystifying. Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that.”

— Sebastian Junger

79. “No one will remember that President Obama supported the Arab Spring if it eventually fails and the region collapses back into the political Dark Ages. If we actively engage these movements with advice, with money, and, when necessary, with military force, then we get a vote in how it all turns out.”

— Sebastian Junger

80. “According to the Times notice, Mr. Bauman called his employees into a meeting and asked them to accept a 10 percent reduction in salary so that he wouldn’t have to fire anyone. They all agreed. Then he quietly decided to give up his personal salary until his company was back on safe ground. The only reason his staff found out was because the company bookkeeper told them. Bauman.”

— Sebastian Junger

81. “The Koran offers us two choices, revenge and forgiveness,” he said. “But the Koran says that forgiveness is better, so we will forgive. We understand that it was a mistake, so we will forgive. The Americans are building schools and roads, and because of this, we will forgive.”

— Sebastian Junger

82. “Because modern society has almost completely eliminated trauma and violence from everyday life, anyone who does suffer those things is deemed to be extraordinarily unfortunate. This gives people access to sympathy and resources but also creates an identity of victimhood that can delay recovery.”

— Sebastian Junger

83. “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.”

— Sebastian Junger

84. “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.”

— Sebastian Junger

85. “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.”

— Sebastian Junger

86. “As people come together to face an existential threat, Fritz found, class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group.”

— Sebastian Junger

87. “The one thing that might be said for societal collapse is that – for a while at least – everyone is equal.”

— Sebastian Junger

88. “Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?” The.”

— Sebastian Junger

89. “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.”

— Sebastian Junger

90. “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?”

— Sebastian Junger

91. “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.”

— Sebastian Junger

92. “A deep and enduring economic crisis like the Great Depression of the 1930s, or a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands of people, might change America’s fundamental calculus about economic justice. Until then, the American public will probably continue to refrain from broadly challenging both male and female corporate leaders who compensate themselves far in excess of their value to society. That.”

— Sebastian Junger

93. “People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long. The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right.”

— Sebastian Junger

94. “Two of the behaviors that set early humans apart were the systematic sharing of food and altruistic group defense. Other primates did very little of either but, increasingly, hominids did, and those behaviors helped set them on an evolutionary path that produced the modern world.”

— Sebastian Junger

95. “The problem with fear, though, is that it isn’t any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy – anxiety, dread, panic, foreboding – and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another.”

— Sebastian Junger

96. “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.”

— Sebastian Junger

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

— Sebastian Junger

98. “My father’s reaction surprised me. Vietnam had made him vehemently antiwar, so I expected him to applaud my decision, but instead he told me that American soldiers had saved the world from fascism during World War II and that thousands of young Americans were buried in his homeland of France. “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

99. “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.”

— Sebastian Junger

100. “At the heart of most stable governments is a willingness to share power with people you disagree with – and may even hate.”

— Sebastian Junger