Junger Quotes

#1. Anyone who's traveled with me to Afghanistan knows why I love this book: 'War,' by Sebastian Junger.

Joe Biden

#2. Economic absurdities are produced only when power is at stake.

Ernst Junger

#3. Meteorologist see perfect in strange things, and the meshing of three completely independent weather systems to form a hundred-year event is one of them. My God, thought Case, this is the perfect storm.

Sebastian Junger

#4. Whether ... civilization has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested," he wrote in 1795. "[Both] the most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized." When

Sebastian Junger

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. It has always been my ideal in war to eliminate all feelings of hatred and to treat my enemy as an enemy only in battle and to honour him as a man according to his courage.

Ernst Junger

#11. This was the home of the great god Pain, and for the first time I looked through a devilish chink into the depths of his realm. And fresh shells came down all the time.

Ernst Junger

#12. The partisan wants to change the law, the criminal break it; the anarch wants neither. He is not for or against the law. While not acknowledging the law, he does try to recognize it like the laws of nature, and he adjusts accordingly.

Ernst Junger

#13. Much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. (pg. 140)

Sebastian Junger

#14. Belief in these solitary men springs from a longing for a fraternity without name, for a deeper spiritual relationship than is possible between human beings.

Ernst Junger

#15. 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. In

Sebastian Junger

#16. 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

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

Sebastian Junger

#18. The anarch wages his own wars, even when marching in rank and file

Ernst Junger

#19. Habent sua fata libelli et balli [Books and bullets have their own destinies]

Ernst Junger

#20. Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.

Sebastian Junger

#21. When I saw several thugs attack a lone man, or a larger man a small one, or even when a mastiff attacked a toy Pomeranian, not virtue but plain disgust upset my insides. This early variety of defeatism later became an obsolete trait - damaging me in today's world.

Ernst Junger

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. Unfortunately robots capable of manufacturing robots do not exist. That would be the philosopher's stone, the squaring of the circle.

Ernst Junger

#25. There is only one kind of land reform today: expropriation.

Ernst Junger

#26. Words had lost their meaning; even war was no longer war. Monteron would tum in his grave if he could hear what they called war nowadays. After all, peace was no longer peace.

Ernst Junger

#27. In my experience, I have found that creativity demands a vigilant mind, which is weakened by the influence of drugs.

Ernst Junger

#28. 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

#29. Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.

Ernst Junger

#30. 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

Sebastian Junger

#31. 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

#32. War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144)

Sebastian Junger

#33. Another study notes about Bali: "Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities." As

Sebastian Junger

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

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

Sebastian Junger

#38. The attacks of 9/11 came out of Afghanistan. It was a failed state, a rogue nation. That's why al Qaeda was there in the first place.

Sebastian Junger

#39. order to play that game one more time. The

Sebastian Junger

#40. I came to realize that one single human being, comprehended in his depth, who gives generously from the treasures of his heart, bestows on us more riches than Caesar or Alexander could ever conquer. Here is our kingdom, the best of monarchies, the best republic. Here is our garden, our happiness.

Ernst Junger

#41. All journalists hope that their work will inspire a broader conversation. I think that's just what journalism is.

Sebastian Junger

#42. 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

#43. Freedom is based on the anarch's awareness that he can kill himself. He carries this awareness around; it accompanies him like a shadow that he can conjure up. A leap from this bridge will set me free.

Ernst Junger

#44. The more the panic grows, the more uplifting the image of a man who refuses to bow to the terror.

Ernst Junger

#45. One of the anarch's emoluments is that he is distinguished for things that he has done on the side or that go against his grain.

Ernst Junger

#46. I had always been man enough to ruin myself without help.

Ernst Junger

#47. A work of art wastes away and becomes lustreless in surroundings where it has a price but not a value. It radiates only when surrounded by love. It is bound to wilt in a world where the rich have no time and the cultivated no money. But it never harmonizes with borrowed greatness.

Ernst Junger

#48. 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

#49. There are no journalistic ethics that transcend the value of human life. There are none. In a situation where you can save a human life, you must. There isn't any conflict in my mind.

Sebastian Junger

#50. There are photographers who don't really engage with their subject. It's a really unfortunate phrase, but they take their photo and they leave with it. It works but I think it ultimately limits how profound the work can be.

Sebastian Junger

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

Sebastian Junger

#52. 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

#53. They had not yet started out across a continent of grief that a lifetime of walking could not cover.

Sebastian Junger

#54. 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

#55. We do not escape our boundaries or our innermost being. We do not change. It is true we may be transformed, but we always walk within our boundaries, within the marked-off circle.

Ernst Junger

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

Sebastian Junger

#57. 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

#58. 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.

Sebastian Junger

#59. The anarch knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves.

Ernst Junger

#60. I was surprised how open and unguarded the military was. I expected more scrutiny, more supervision from command.

Sebastian Junger

#61. The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment ... that maximize[s] consumption at the long-term cost of well-being,

Sebastian Junger

#62. War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.

Sebastian Junger

#63. We usually end up finding what we are looking for, but we only look for what we already know.

Alejandro Junger

#64. I, as an anarch, renouncing any bond, any limitation of freedom, also reject compulsory education as nonsense. It was one of the greatest well-springs of misfortune in the world.

Ernst Junger

#65. Firemen don't talk about whether a burning warehouse is worth saving.

Sebastian Junger

#66. The army consists of the first infantry division and eight million replacements.

Sebastian Junger

#67. Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national 'pretexts,' led to a rapidly escalating world civil war.

Ernst Junger

#68. A great physicist is always a metaphysicist as well; he has a higher concept of his knowledge and his task.

Ernst Junger

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. The human concern for others would seem to be the one story that, adequately told, no person can fully bear to hear. Joanna's

Sebastian Junger

#72. War affected my family a lot, and I was quite curious about it. I first went off to war in the early 90's as a journalist, partly out of curiosity and partly because I needed a career. War reporting has been very glamorous and exciting, and everything else that young men like.

Sebastian Junger

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

Sebastian Junger

#74. 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

#75. One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.

Sebastian Junger

#76. 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

#77. I think, politically, I'm pretty left-wing, and I try to be very neutral in my work.

Sebastian Junger

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

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. The anarch, as I have expounded elsewhere, is the pendant to the monarch; he is as sovereign as the monarch, and also freer since he does not have to rule.

Ernst Junger

#81. Gang shootings - as indiscriminate as they often are - still don't have the nihilistic intent of rampages. Rather, they are rooted in an exceedingly strong sense of group loyalty and revenge, and bystanders sometimes get killed in the process.

Sebastian Junger

#82. And yet when I went to sleep, it was like I became part of some larger human experience that was utterly heartbreaking. It was far too much to acknowledge when I was awake.

Sebastian Junger

#83. 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

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

Sebastian Junger

#85. When once it is no longer possible to understand how a man gives his life for his country--and the time will come--then all is over with that faith also, and the idea of the Fatherland is dead; and then, perhaps, we shall be envied, as we envy the saints their inward and irresistible strength.

Ernst Junger

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. they may have a harder time achieving the three pillars of self-determination - autonomy,

Sebastian Junger

#89. 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

#90. In this place a mind was at work to negate the image of a free and intact man. It intended to rely on man power in the same way that it had relied on horsepower. It wanted units to be equal and divisable, and for that purpose man had to be destroyed as the horse had already been destroyed.

Ernst Junger

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

Sebastian Junger

#92. Today only the person who no longer believes in a happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment.

Ernst Junger

#93. When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose ... with a resulting improvement in mental health,

Sebastian Junger

#94. I consider it poor historical form to make fun of ancestral mistakes without respecting the eros that was linked to them. We are no less in bondage to the Zeitgeist; folly is handed down, we merely don a new cap.

Ernst Junger

#95. There's no reason to do anything twice, and certainly no reason to do something that almost killed you.

Sebastian Junger

#96. He was fleeced, robbed; and yet he was the exploiter. The government, unhesitatingly obliging to the majority, pocketed his taxes, and allowed him to be bled.

Ernst Junger

#97. 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

#98. The American military generally counts on a kill ratio of 10 to 1 when fighting lightly armed insurgents: for every dead American, there are probably 10 dead enemy.

Sebastian Junger

#99. To us, too, the machine is something external, something we that we have set up outside ourselves. But it is our indispensable resource, whether in peace or war; and for that reason we endorse it and accept it.

Ernst Junger

#100. 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