Quotes from Sebastian Junger

Even if he or she is part of a family, that is not the same as belonging to a group that shares resources and experiences almost everything collectively.

Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy of its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long.

He'd been generous, yes, but lots of people are generous; what made him different was the fact that he'd taken responsibility for me.

Some of these people have been heading there, unavoidably, for months; others made a bad choice just a few days ago.

if you're looking for enlightenment it's not going to happen on a oil tanker

And they never have to win; they just have to keep not losing.

What I liked about the encounter was that it showed how very close the energy of male conflict and male closeness can be. It's almost as if they are two facets of the same quality; just change a few details and instead of heading toward collision, the men head toward unity. There seemed to be a great human potential out there, organized around the idea of belonging, and the trick was to convince people that their interests had more in common than they had in conflict.

The men could only look at each other through the falling snow, from land to sea, from sea to land, and realize how unimportant they all were. —SHIP ON THE ROCKS, NEWBURYPORT, MASSACHUSETTS, 1839, NO SURVIVORS. (SIDNEY PERLEY, Historic Storms of New England, 1891)

We walked around four hundred miles and most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom but surely that is one of them.

Multiple studies, including a 2007 analysis from the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, found that a person's chance of getting chronic PTSD is in great part a function of their experiences before going to war. Statistically, the 20 percent of people who fail to overcome trauma tend to be those who are already burdened by psychological issues, either because they inherited them or because they suffered abuse as children.

This is the war too, and you have to look straight at it, I told myself. You have to look straight at all of it or you have no business being here at all.

Financial independence can lead to isolation, and isolation can put people at a greatly increased risk of depression and suicide. This might be a fair trade for a generally wealthier society, but a trade it is.

there is mostly leadership by example and decision by consensus.

The only thing that makes battle psychologically tolerable is the brotherhood among soldiers.

Thomas Paine, one of the principal architects of American democracy, wrote a formal denunciation of civilization in a tract called Agrarian Justice: "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.

You can be passive and not make a decision that may save your life," he says, "or you can accept death as a possibility. That was the crux of the whole thing.

One of God's great oversights is that dogs don't live as long as men, I thought. And that men don't move as fast as dogs.

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

It may say something about human nature that a surprising number of Americans—mostly men—wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their own. They emulated Indians, married them, were adopted by them, and on some occasions even fought alongside them. And the opposite almost never happened: Indians almost never ran away to join white society.

The earliest and most basic definition of community—of tribe—would be the group of people that you would both help feed and help defend.

Communities that have been devastated by natural or man-made disasters almost never lapse into chaos and disorder; if anything, they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair to individuals.

Robert Frost famously wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. The word "tribe" is far harder to define, but a start might be the people you feel compelled to share the last of your food with.

If you want to make a society work, then you don't keep underscoring the places where you're different—you underscore your shared humanity," she told me. "I'm appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?

An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain," one of the survivors wrote. "The equality of all men.