Quotes by Sebastian Junger

About Sebastian Junger:

Sebastian Junger is an American journalist, most famous for the best-selling book The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (1997), his award-winning chronicle of the war in Afghanistan in the documentary films Restrepo (2010), Korengal (2014), and his book War (2010).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I had grown up during Vietnam. I had no connections to the U.S. military, and I had a pretty cynical default opinion about the U.S. military.

Sebastian Junger

People really in the meat grinder of the front lines are not, for the most part, insured or salaried network correspondents. They're young freelancers. They're kind of a cheap date for the news industry.

Sebastian Junger

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

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 trag...

Sebastian Junger

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

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...

Sebastian Junger

I hope I get married one day.

Sebastian Junger

The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad divorce. Life's filled with trauma. You don't need to go to war to find it; it's going to find you. W...

Sebastian Junger

I don't think people would climb mountains or jump off bridges with parachutes or kayak Class V rapids if those things didn't offer the brief and horrible illusion of imminent death. They would just be complicated, time-consuming endeavors that we'd ...

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 throug...

Sebastian Junger

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

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

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

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

I have been working since I was 20, and I'm 38. I actually once averaged out what I had made over my professional life. I think I could have made that much as a waiter or an insurance salesman. You know, I spent so many years in my 20's making $10,00...

Sebastian Junger

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

Here's an easy way to see if a war movie is being truthful: If you see an explosion on a faraway hillside and the sound of the explosion and the detonation of the bomb happen at the same time - if they're putting the sound and the vision together in ...

Sebastian Junger

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 f...

Sebastian Junger

Well, the fact that the news industry doesn't have enough money to only send salaried staff to war zones means there is an enormous, wide-open opportunity for young people who want to be on staff and don't know how to get there.

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 activ...

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 ...

Sebastian Junger

Author Bio

  • NameSebastian Junger
  • DescriptionAmerican author, journalist and documentarian
  • BornJanuary 17, 1962
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionFilm Director; Journalist