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.
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
Few revolutions succeed, and when they do, you often discover they did not gain what you hoped for, and you condemn yourself to perpetual fear, as the parties you defeated may always regain power and work for your ruin.
I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.
It is with rivers as it is with people: the greatest are not always the most agreeable nor the best to live with.
Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide.
All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.
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