Top 100 Chris Hedges Quotes
#1. There are no impediments now to corporations. None. And what they want is for us to give up. They want us to become passive. They want us to become tacitly complicit in our own destruction.
Chris Hedges
#2. The citizen has become irrelevant. He or she can participate in heavily choreographed elections, but the demands of corporations and banks are paramount.
Chris Hedges
#3. The more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world.
Chris Hedges
#4. After years on a drunken bender, Americans are awakening to lies masked in patriotism and glory.
Chris Hedges
#5. It has enriched a tiny global elite that has no loyalty to the nation-state. These corporations, if we use the language of patriotism, are traitors.
Chris Hedges
#6. The United States of Andrew Jackson or George Washington is not the United States of Frederick Douglass or Sitting Bull. But we present our history from the perspective of the winners, from those in power
Chris Hedges
#7. The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.
Chris Hedges
#8. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.
Chris Hedges
#9. Our march toward self-annihilation has already obliterated ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans and wiped out half of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet.25 At this rate, by 2030, only ten percent of the Earth's tropical forests will remain.
Chris Hedges
#10. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.42
Chris Hedges
#11. Some 8,000 nonviolent Occupy protesters were arrested across the nation. Not one banker or investor went to jail for causing the 2008 financial meltdown. The disparity of justice mirrored the disparity in incomes and the disparity in power.
Chris Hedges
#12. This magical thinking, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity. ... It has turned whole nations, such as the United States, into self-consuming machines of death.
Chris Hedges
#13. The inability to grasp the pathology* of our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults.
Chris Hedges
#14. A group trying to curtail the civil rights of gays and lesbians portrays itself, in this rhetorical twist, as victims of an effort to curtail the civil rights of Christians. One
Chris Hedges
#15. It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance ; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt.
Chris Hedges
#16. There is no reliable data on the number of military-style assault weapons in private hands, but the working estimate is about 1.5 million.
Chris Hedges
#17. The sack of kittens sinking in the icy creek increases the cold
Chris Hedges
#18. Just remember,' a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel told me as he strapped his pistol belt under his arm before we crossed into Kuwait, 'that none of these boys is fighting for home, for the flag, for all that crap the politicians feed the public. They are fighting for each other, just for each other.
Chris Hedges
#19. Racism towards Muslims is as evil as anti-Semitism, but try to express this simple truth on a partisan Palestinian or Israeli website.
Chris Hedges
#20. Scratch the surface of the survivalist cult in the United States and you expose terrified white supremacists.
Chris Hedges
#21. There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.
Chris Hedges
#22. The war began with words, but none of us paid any attention.'
- Seka Milanovik
Chris Hedges
#23. Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.
Chris Hedges
#24. Rape, mutilation, abuse, and theft are the natural outcome of a world in which force rules, in which human beings are objects.
Chris Hedges
#25. The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.
Chris Hedges
#26. If we don't hold fast to our moral principles, nobody's going to. We don't have to have a majority, but once ten, fifteen, twenty million people start voting left, we'll scare the piss out of the Democrats, and they'll have to respond. But they're not going to respond to us until that happens.
Chris Hedges
#27. We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy.
Chris Hedges
#28. The cable news channels have cleverly seized on the creed of objectivity and redefined it in populist terms. They attack news based on verifiable fact for its liberal bias, for, in essence, failing to be objective, and promise a return to "genuine" objectivity.
Chris Hedges
#29. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers.
Chris Hedges
#30. Most of these who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war.
Chris Hedges
#31. War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians.
Chris Hedges
#32. Human kindness is deeply subversive to totalitarian creeds, which seek to thwart all compassion toward those deemed unworthy of moral consideration, those branded as internal or external enemies.
Chris Hedges
#33. No one who lives under constant surveillance, who is subject to detention anywhere at any time, whose conversations, proclivities, and habits are recorded, stored, and analyzed, can be described as free.
Chris Hedges
#34. Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.
Chris Hedges
#35. If we don't rebel, if we're not physically in an active rebellion, then it's spiritual death.
Chris Hedges
#36. As the economy unravels, as hundreds of millions of Americans confront the fact that things will not get better, life for those targeted by this culture of hate will become increasingly difficult. Rational debate will prove useless.
Chris Hedges
#37. Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.
Chris Hedges
#38. It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate state needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role it refuses to permit intellectuals to think or function independently.
Chris Hedges
#39. Those who look at others as simple, one-dimensional caricatures fuel the rage of the dispossessed.
Chris Hedges
#40. The danger is not Islam or Christianity or any other religion. It is the human heart - the capacity we all have for evil. All human institutions with a lust for power give their utopian visions divine sanction
Chris Hedges
#41. W. Bush's life is a case study in the insidious affirmative action for the rich.
Chris Hedges
#42. Positive psychology is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis
Chris Hedges
#43. No real journalist makes $5 million a year ... Those in power fear and dislike real journalists.
Chris Hedges
#44. War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death.
Chris Hedges
#45. Useless DECEMBER 7, 2009 Liberals are a useless lot.
Chris Hedges
#46. Lies are considered true. Truth is considered seditious.
Chris Hedges
#47. The charade of politics is to make voters think that the personal narrative of the candidate affects the operation of the corporate state. It doesn't really matter on the fundamental issues whether the President is Republican or Democratic.
Chris Hedges
#48. The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism
Chris Hedges
#49. We on the left have forgotten that the question is not how do you get good people to rule, most people who rule are mediocre at best and usually venal. The question is how do we make those in power frightened of us and not be seduced by formal political processes.
Chris Hedges
#50. The notion that the press was used in the [first Iraq] war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort.
Chris Hedges
#51. Becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species.
Chris Hedges
#52. There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege, it will always be at the expense of truth and justice
Chris Hedges
#54. Where else, but from the industrialized world, did the suicide hijackers learn that the huge explosions and death above a city skyline are a peculiar and effective form of communication? They have mastered the language.
Chris Hedges
#55. The rise of the antiwar and civil rights movements, along with the emergence of radical groups such as the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the American Indian movement, saw a return to systematized abuse within the prison system.
Chris Hedges
#56. Rebellion is not going to go away ... What has been unleashed, I think, can't be stopped ... The importance of continuing acts of resistance is that it keeps this narrative alive ... We speak a fundamental truth about this system that terrifies them.
Chris Hedges
#58. The fact that alienated people can be counted on to vent their spleen in ineffectual directions - by fighting among themselves - relieves the government of the need to deal fundamentally with the conditions which cause their frustrations,
Chris Hedges
#59. Totalitarian states use propaganda to orchestrate historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. The object is to make sure the populace does not remember what it means to be free. And once a population does not remember what it means to be free, it does not react when freedom is stripped from it.
Chris Hedges
#60. What kind of a world are we going to leave the next generation? I, at least, want my children to look back and say, "My daddy was being arrested at the White House fence and booed off commencement stages. He was trying."
Chris Hedges
#61. When you're violent you undermine everything.
Chris Hedges
#62. I have seen children shot in El Salvador, Algeria, Guatemala, Sarajevo, but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.
Chris Hedges
#63. The superior force of despotic regimes is disarmed not through violence but through conversion.
Chris Hedges
#64. In war, we always deform ourselves, our essence.
Chris Hedges
#65. Fascism is aided and advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of being conned and lied to by a bankrupt liberal establishment, whose only reason to vote for a politician or support a political party is to elect the least worst. This, for many voters, is the best Clinton can offer.
Chris Hedges
#66. The historian Will Durant calculated that there have only been twenty-nine years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere.
Chris Hedges
#67. Battling evil, cruelty, and injustice allows us to retain our identity, a sense of meaning, and ultimately our freedom.
Chris Hedges
#68. Again, although I'm not a particularly religious person, I go back to the religious left that I come out of: There are moral imperatives to fight back. As Daniel Berrigan says, "We're called to do the good." And then we have to let it go. It's not our job to know where the good goes.
Chris Hedges
#69. The belief that rational and quantifiable disciplines such as science can be used to perfect human society is no less absurd than a belief in magic, angels, and divine intervention.
Chris Hedges
#70. I'm not saying we're going to win. I am saying rebellion becomes a way to protect your own dignity. Corporations are, theologically speaking, institutions of death. They commodify everything - the natural world, human beings - that they exploit until exhaustion or collapse. They know no limits.
Chris Hedges
#71. The arts often realize human truths well before other branches of human endeavor.
Chris Hedges
#72. The violent subjugation of the Palestinians, Iraqis, and Afghans will only ensure that those who oppose us will increasingly speak to us in the language we speak to them - violence.
Chris Hedges
#73. Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jail and prisons, however, they can each generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year.
Chris Hedges
#74. The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief.
Chris Hedges
#75. Patriotism, often a thinly veiled form of collective self-worship, celebrates our goodness, our ideals, our mercy and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us.
Chris Hedges
#76. Sandy illustrated the depraved mentality of an oligarchic and corporate elite that, as conditions worsen, retreats into self-contained gated communities, guts basic services, and abandons the wider population.
Chris Hedges
#77. One needs solitude and quiet to think. The cacophony of modern culture is designed to make that impossible ...
Chris Hedges
#78. The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic.
Chris Hedges
#79. Here, in the land of happy thoughts, there are no gross injustices, no abuses of authority, no economic and political systems to challenge, and no reason to complain. Here, we are all happy.
Chris Hedges
#80. Bankrupt corporate capitalism is on its way to bankrupting the socialism that is trying to save it,
Chris Hedges
#81. Economics dominates politics - and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.
Chris Hedges
#82. The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.
Chris Hedges
#83. Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.
Chris Hedges
#84. The property that grounded the self in Romanticism was sincerity, and in modernism was authenticity, then in postmod ernism it is visibility.10
Chris Hedges
#85. They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn't like the smell of the poor.
Chris Hedges
#86. Hanna Krall's book Shielding the Flame drew on the experience of Dr. Marek Edelman, who before he died in 2009 was the sole survivor of the five-person command that led the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Chris Hedges
#87. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
Chris Hedges
#88. A society without the means to detect lies and theft soon squanders its liberty and freedom.
Chris Hedges
#89. The imperial projects will continue, Wall Street will be unimpeded in its malfeasance and criminal activity, social programs will continue to be cut, maybe not at the same speed as under a Republican Administration, but it's all headed in the same direction.
Chris Hedges
#90. The press, or at least most of it, has lost the passion, the outrage, and the sense of mission that once drove reporters to defy authority and tell the truth.
Chris Hedges
#91. Aristotle said that only two living entities are capable of complete solitude and complete separateness: God and beast. Because of this the most acute form of suffering for human beings is loneliness.
Chris Hedges
#92. There was in the House only one dissenting vote, from Barbara J. Lee, a Democrat from California, who warned that military action could not guarantee the safety of the country and that 'as we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.
Chris Hedges
#93. Political leaders, who use the tools of mass propaganda to create a sense of faux intimacy with citizens, no longer need to be competent, sincere, or honest. They need only to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they need a story, a personal narrative.
Chris Hedges
#94. The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world - an average of 89 per 100 people,
Chris Hedges
#95. The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar.
Chris Hedges
#97. We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe.
Chris Hedges
#98. We live in imaginary, virtual worlds created by corporations that profit from our deception.
Chris Hedges
#99. War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.
Chris Hedges
#100. It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one's own country, than an outcast from one's self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.
Chris Hedges
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