Sebastian Junger Quotes

Were there no uniforms, there would probably be no armies.

I'd spent seven years in an all-boys school: 2,000 adolescents in the same khaki uniforms striking hunting poses, stalking lunchrooms, classrooms, changing rooms, looking for boys who didn't fit in.

Group action -- yes; group thinking -- no.

When I first joined the army, I felt I had to be part of the alpha male culture. But I didn't.

Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others.

The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

It's tough to stay focused and be able to separate life from our job. We are paid to perform, and we are performers. You gotta have good brothers to lean on.

We're in a very individual sport, but they like us not to be so individual. They'd rather have you look like every other cookie cutter guy and have you believe that you're replaceable when you're really not.

I had friends who were jocks or whatever... Then, around 12 or 13, kids get cliquish and cruel, and that disgusted me. It seemed a reprehensible use of one's arbitrary social status. So I got really aggressive about it and became more of a weird kid.

Being in this band is like being in high school all over again. We're like a bunch of little maniacs.

It's hard to be the one that stands out when, you know, in a ballet company, you're trying to create unison and uniform when you're in a corps de ballet.

There used to be a few 'Great Santinis', but now there's many 'Great Santinis'.

I think when you have a group of guys that care about the community, the city, care about each other, it just makes for a unique locker room.

Like it or not, Jesse Ventura is a Navy SEAL. He did the pushups and put up with the cold water, just like the rest of us.

I hang around military guys and like it.

In the military, there's a sense of camaraderie that can sometimes make people bystanders. There were a lot of really good men that I served with, but many of them watched me get discriminated against while looking the other way.

My school was pretty tough, and I played football there so I would be accepted, to save myself a kicking.

As a group of players, and as a set-up, you need to set your stall out as to what is acceptable and what is not.

Whenever we come back from another project, we're always so stoked to see each other and play with each other again. I really feel like that's been the key to why we're still together as a band. I remember a period five or six years ago feeling a little burnt out and wasn't sure whether I wanted to keep doing it.

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.

... members of a powerful group are raised to believe (however illogically) that whatever affects it will also affect them. On theother hand, members of less powerful groups are raised to believe (however illogically) that each individual can escape the group's fate. Thus, cohesion is encouraged on the one hand, and disunity is fostered on the other.

The more tightly packed the group, the greater the need for strict social ranks and orders.

What you have when everyone wears the same playclothes for all occasions, is addressed by nickname, expected to participate in Show And Tell, and bullied out of any desire form privacy, is not democracy; it is kindergarten.

The brown monkey's instinct to kill is correct; such men are dangerous to all monkey customs.