“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, quote from War
“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, quote from War
“War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. ... Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war, but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“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, quote from War
“The army consists of the first infantry division and eight million replacements.”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“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, quote from War
“War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144)”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“During the air war of 1944, a four-man combat crew on a B-17 bomber took a vow to never abandon one another no matter how desperate the situation. The aircraft was hit by flak during a mission and went into a terminal dive, and the pilot ordered everyone to bail out. The top turret gunner obeyed the order, but the ball turret gunner discovered that a piece of flak had jammed his turret and he could not get out. The other three men in his pact could have bailed out with the parachutes, but they stayed with him until the plan hit the ground and exploded. They all died.”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“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, quote from War
“...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, quote from War
“Most firefights go by so fast that acts of bravery or cowardice are more or less spontaneous. Soldiers might live the rest of their lives regretting a decision that they don’t even remember making; they might receive a medal for doing something that was over before they even knew they were doing it.”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“The fight lasts ten or fifteen minutes and then the A-10s show up and tilt into their dives. Ninety rounds a second the size of beer cans unzipping the mountainsides with a sound like the sky ripping. The men look up and whoop when they hear it, a punishment so unnegotiable it might as well have come from God.”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. —Winston Churchill”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“The problem is that it's hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well.”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“I came to think of it as a kind of zen practice: the Zen of not fucking up.”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“order to play that game one more time. The”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“The problem with fear, though, is that it isn’t any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy—anxiety, dread, panic, foreboding—and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another.”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it’s much more like football than, say, like a gang fight. The unit that choreographs their actions best usually wins. They might take casualties, but they win. That choreography—you lay down fire while I run forward, then I cover you while you move your team up—is so powerful that it can overcome enormous tactical deficits. There is choreography for storming Omaha Beach, for taking out a pillbox bunker, and for surviving an L-shaped ambush at night on the Gatigal. The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what’s best for him, but on what’s best for the group. If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. —Winston Churchill (or George Orwell)”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“Brotherhood has nothing to do with feelings; it has to do with how you define your relationship to others. It has to do with the rather profound decision to put the welfare of the group above your personal welfare. In such a system, feelings are meaningless. In such a system, who you are entirely depends on your willingness to surrender who you are.”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“The Koran offers us two choices, revenge and forgiveness,” he said. “But the Koran says that forgiveness is better, so we will forgive. We understand that it was a mistake, so we will forgive. The Americans are building schools and roads, and because of this, we will forgive.”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
Sebastian Junger
Born place: in Boston, Massachusetts, The United States
See more on GoodReads
“Hold on to this life, Emma," he whispered. "You're so much stronger than you think you are. ~ Evan”
― Rebecca Donovan, quote from Barely Breathing
“The boar, the stag, and the eagle met on the last craggy peak of the world, look down, and sighed at what they saw. The boar was a king, and he said, "There is not enough people." The stag was a poet, and he said, "There is not enough beauty." The eagle was a cleric, and her said, "There is not enough mystery." Then the wolf, arriving late, looked up instead of down and said, "There is not enough hunger," and promptly ate them all.
If the boar was king, the stag was poet, and the eagle was cleric, then what was the wolf?”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Forest Born
“Samuel thundered that no American factory hand was worth more than eighty cents a day. And yet he could be thankful for the opportunity to pay a hundred thousand dollars or more for a painting by an Italian three centuries dead. And he capped this insult by giving paintings to museums for the spiritual elevation of the poor. The museums were closed on Sundays.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
“[G]randma was always afraid of something. She set aside time each day for dread. And not nameless dread. She was quite specific about the various tragedies stalking her. She feared pneumonia, muggers, riptides, meteors, drunk drivers, drug addicts, serial killers, tornadoes, doctors, unscrupulous grocery clerks, and the Russians. The depth of Grandma’s dread came home to me when she bought a lottery ticket and sat before the tv as the numbers were called. After her first three numbers were a match, she began praying feverishly that she wouldn’t have the next three. She dreaded winning, for fear that her heart would give out.”
― J.R. Moehringer, quote from The Tender Bar
“Sudden conviction races through me, almost terrifying in its total certainty. I can't give him up. He's the other part of me. He gets what it feels like to be separate from everything and everyone, to reject the path others lay out for you. We're the same. Two sides to the same coin.”
― Sophie Jordan, quote from Vanish
Hello? Is Anybody Th...
Mrs Craddock
The Debt of Tears
The Last Battle of t...
Backroads to Far Tow...
The Piano Man's Daug...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
