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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
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Sebastian Junger
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 17
Actor
Author
Cinematographer
Film Director
Film Producer
Journalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Belmont
Massachusetts
Way
Ultimate
Dismiss
Life
Taking
Obscene
Theory
Indulgence
Risk
Persist
Ways
Insult
Self
Reasonable
Every
Shouldn
Preciousness
Something
Despite
Persists
More quotes by Sebastian Junger
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
A grenade launcher will easily take out a tank a Molotov cocktail placed in its air intake will destroy one as well.
Sebastian Junger
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
If hardship brought out the worst in people, the human race wouldn't have survived. Right after 9/11, for instance, the murder rate actually went down in New York City. In World War II during the Blitz, the civilians of London were bombed almost every night for six months, but psychiatric admissions declined.
Sebastian Junger
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
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
The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly.
Sebastian Junger
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
How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?
Sebastian Junger
War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.
Sebastian Junger
Well, you got to remember, bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans and, in some ways, he and his ideology killed tens of thousands of his fellow Muslims, including Pakistanis. I understand that that was provocative and complicated for Pakistan, but only if you accept the idea that he was an acceptable member of Pakistani society.
Sebastian Junger
I'm a good liberal, and I grew up in a very liberal family and had very strongly held beliefs.
Sebastian Junger
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
Firemen don't talk about whether a burning warehouse is worth saving.
Sebastian Junger
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
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
Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.
Sebastian Junger
I decided to start a medical training program for freelancers, only freelancers. They're the ones who are doing most of the combat reporting. They're taking most of the risks. They're absorbing most of the casualties. And they're the most underserved and under-resourced of everyone in the entire news business.
Sebastian Junger
An adventure is a situation where the outcome is not entirely within your control. It is up to fate, in other words
Sebastian Junger
I went to Afghanistan in '96 to write about terrorist training camps south of Jalalabad and Tora Bora, in the mountains. I was there right before the Taliban took over, literally a few weeks before they took Kabul. The frontline wasn't terribly active, but it was definitely there. And they swept into power.
Sebastian Junger
