Sebastian Junger Quotes

When you're in the military, you teeter on the edge of that line of life and death. The reason you feel so alive when you come through is because you know you've cheated death - and that and the adrenaline rush is addictive, no question.

The choices Israelis face and the decisions they make, day in and day out, are literally the difference between life and death. In many ways, I liken their reactions to the way I felt while serving in Iraq.

When you've been in life-threatening situations, you become aware that life is not for ever.

If you're not ready to die, then how can you live?

I've always been the kind of person who, if there's anything that can kill me, I want to know something about it.

Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.

Coming up through the ranks of any calling can be rough, but that battered soul who survives the early years of courting the comic muse comes close to knowing what only the soldier knows: What combat is like.

There's a thing I think children realise at a certain age, which is that if their parents say, 'Don't do it', and they go ahead and do it, they're still not going to die. And I think that's what it is: that no matter what you do, you're not going to die.

You've got all these people making action movies, and they've never been in a life-or-death situation.

When your life is threatened, whether it's by human beings or by disease or whatever, you come to appreciate life.

Any athletic coach or manager who tells players that their game is like being in a war, has never been in a war. War is a dirty business and should never be compared to sports. It is an insult to those who have fought in a war. .

Nicknamed 'Mad-Dog Mattis' by his men, he was a command warrior in the old George Patton mode. He wasn't an armchair general by any definition of that much-maligned term. If a Marine re-upped at a location where he was present, he would personally go to that Marine and thank him or her for rejoining.

I love fighting. I don't know what it is in me, whether it's a sickness or a gene, but I just love standing in front of another fighter and going for it: they can hurt me, and I can hurt them.

First, I am afraid to die and I love to live. But an adventure is only an adventure when there is the threat of dying.

In the ring I'm a different animal.

Here life itself, life at its best and healthiest, awaits the caprice of the bullet. Let us see the development of the day. All else may stand over, perhaps for ever. Existence is never so sweet as when it is at hazard.

This forms the nub of a dilemna that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you're too driven you're likely to die.

We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't.

In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.

Maybe it's ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you're alive for a while, and then you realize you're going to die, and that's such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.

When you're in the military, especially if you serve, you leave in this heightened world of having adrenaline course through you, all the time. You get addicted to that because adrenaline is essentially a drug.

This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war.

A species has to become pretty intellectually advanced in order to grasp the concept of death in the abstract, and to dream up the idea of immortality. Long before that (in evolutionary terms) all species with brains have the survival instinct in some form. So, I am just saying that there are many existent proofs of species that have one, but not the other.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.

War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.