Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I hope I get married one day.
War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.
Firemen don't talk about whether a burning warehouse is worth saving.
Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.
The army consists of the first infantry division and eight million replacements.
I think, politically, I'm pretty left-wing, and I try to be very neutral in my work.
War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144)
I'm a good liberal, and I grew up in a very liberal family and had very strongly held beliefs.
There's no reason to do anything twice, and certainly no reason to do something that almost killed you.
Who wants a life of ease? And who wants a life in the office that you hate, and who wants to play golf?
How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?
I’ve stopped war reporting. I realized that I’d answered all of my questions about war and about myself.
I've stopped war reporting. I realized that I'd answered all of my questions about war and about myself.
People who do really dangerous tasks can't afford to sit around and discuss the merits of what they're doing.
I was surprised how open and unguarded the military was. I expected more scrutiny, more supervision from command.
All journalists hope that their work will inspire a broader conversation. I think that's just what journalism is.
I don't think journalists in World War II were objective about the Nazis, and I don't think they should have been.
An adventure is a situation where the outcome is not entirely within your control. It is up to fate, in other words
A grenade launcher will easily take out a tank; a Molotov cocktail placed in its air intake will destroy one as well.
The only thing that makes battle psychologically tolerable is the brotherhood among soldiers. You need each other to get by.
The attacks of 9/11 came out of Afghanistan. It was a failed state, a rogue nation. That's why al Qaeda was there in the first place.
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.
If you shell a military base and happen to kill civilians, you have not committed a war crime; if you deliberately target cities and towns, you have.
The American military generally counts on a kill ratio of 10 to 1 when fighting lightly armed insurgents: for every dead American, there are probably 10 dead enemy.
No matter how many people you kill, using a machine gun in battle is not a war crime because it does not cause unnecessary suffering; it simply performs its job horrifyingly well.
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.
One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.
My wife, Daniela, and I live in an old house from 1810 with three fireplaces at the end of a dead-end dirt road on Cape Cod, so I turn the trees into firewood for us and a friend of mine sells the rest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think objectivity is like this strange myth that people think you're supposed to achieve, but actually, the dirty little secret is that it's not attainable any more than pure justice is attainable by the courts.
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?
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?
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.
There are photographers who don't really engage with their subject. It's a really unfortunate phrase, but they take their photo and they leave with it. It works but I think it ultimately limits how profound the work can be.
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.
Bad news is dramatic. It makes good TV. If there's a firefight on the same day that a school opens up, the media will show the firefight even though the school is way more important and will affect the community for much longer.
If you get an infection, you get a fever; the fever is your body dealing with the infection. If you get traumatized, your mind and your brain have a reaction to that trauma. If you're not dreaming about it, something's probably wrong.
At 19, your brain hasn't finished wiring itself. So the first time you have a good friend die, most people don't go through that at 19. Soldiers do. They're facing life in this accelerated, compressed form, and a lot of times, they're not ready for it.
Traditional Albanian society was based on a clan system and was further divided into brotherhoods and bajraks. The bajrak system identified a local leader, called a bajrakar, who could be counted on to provide a certain number of men for military duty.
Often people who live through the trauma are nostalgic when it's over. When I went back to Bosnia 20 years after the brutal civil war, even people who had been badly wounded told me they missed those times. They were missing their more courageous selves.
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 $10,000 a year.
The Kosovars were granted autonomy at the end of World War II, but then aspiring president Milosevic had the autonomy revoked in 1989, and the Dayton Accords of 1995, which ended the recent war in Bosnia and Croatia, failed to address the issue of Kosovo's status.
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.
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 tragically important.
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
War affected my family a lot, and I was quite curious about it. I first went off to war in the early 90's as a journalist, partly out of curiosity and partly because I needed a career. War reporting has been very glamorous and exciting, and everything else that young men like.
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 through its reflexes whether you want it to or not.