Daily Inspiration Quote by Jock Sturges

Self-defense, in Sturges's telling, isn’t a badge of toughness; it’s a weather system you learn to read when you live under threat. The line turns on that deceptively calm clause, "as far as I was concerned", which frames the skill not as character but as contingency. He’s not romanticizing resilience. He’s narrowing the claim: I learned what I had to learn, and I refused to build an identity around it.

Calling it "transient" does two things at once. It admits necessity while quietly rejecting permanence, the way people who’ve been forced into vigilance often dream of a future where vigilance is obsolete. It’s a pushback against the cultural hunger for trauma-as-brand. In a world that rewards the "survivor" narrative, Sturges insists on something less narratable: defense as an unwanted temporary job.

Context matters because Sturges’s career sits inside one of the most contentious arenas in late-20th-century photography: the body, youth, nudity, and the public’s appetite for moral panic. Whatever one’s view of his work, his name carries the friction between artistic intent and social suspicion. "Defending myself" can read as personal (schoolyard, family, street), but it also echoes the institutional: media storms, legal scrutiny, communities demanding explanation. The subtext is exhaustion with being perpetually on trial.

The sentence’s restraint is the point. No war stories, no righteous anger, just a tight refusal: I did what I had to do to get through, and I’d rather not need that muscle again.