What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.
Interpretation
Safety can often be an illusion, while what seems daunting may actually offer protection.
David Halberstam's quote suggests that our perceptions of safety and danger can be misleading. What appears to be secure might actually conceal risks, while situations that seem challenging could provide unexpected security. The idea that true safety is found elsewhere invites us to rethink our approach to risk and comfort in our lives.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about taking risks in entrepreneurship.
Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.
If youre a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.
Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don't want to do it
Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.
With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.
I ask why your Omnipotent God does not hold a man back when he is about to commit a sin or offence. It is childβs play for God. Why did He not kill war lords? Why did He not remove the fury of war from their minds? In this way God could have saved humanity from great calamity and horror.
Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.
Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written.
Today I live on an island, in a house that is sad, hard, severe, that I built for myself, solitary on a sheer rock over the sea: a house that is the spectre, the secret image of prison. The image of my nostalgia. Maybe I never desired, not even then, to escape from jail. Man is not meant to live freely in freedom, but to be free inside a prison.
Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.
God gave you life and bestowed upon you his attributes; eventually you will return to him.
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