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Chris Hedges
179 quotes
“Most of these who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning ISBN 1586480499, (2002)
“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 (born 1956) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning ISBN 1586480499, (2002)
“As I looked out on the crowd, I was witnessing things I had witnessed in the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina or in squares in Belgrade… it breaks my heart when I see it in my country.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: New York Times Reporter, Chris Hedges was Booed off the Stage and had his Microphone Cut Twice as he Delivered a Graduation Speech on War and Empire at Rockford College in Illinois. (21 May 2003)
“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 (born 1956) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What Every Person Should Know About War (July 2003)
“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 (born 1956) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: War: Realities and Myths (11 June 2005)
“The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. But this does not mean our corporate masters will disappear. Totalitarianism, as George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell wrote, “that is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Force and fraud are all they have left. They will use both.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why I Am a Socialist", truthdig.com, December 29, 2008.
“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 (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Over the last few decades these radical religious broadcasters, who have essentially taken control of the airwaves, have built a parallel information and entertainment service that is piped into tens of millions of American homes as a way of essentially indoctrinating listeners and viewers with this very frightening ideology.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, which is what you get if you are going to be a minister, although I was not ordained. For me, this is not a religious movement. It’s a political movement.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you look at the ideology that pervades this movement, and the term we use for it is dominionism... And dominionists believe that they have been tasked by God to create the Christian society through violence... essentially an ideology of exclusion and of hatred. It is a totalitarian ideology. It is not religious in any way. These people quote, as they did at this convention, selectively and with gross distortions from the Gospels.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They have built a vision of America that is radically — and a vision of this — and latched onto a religious movement or awakening that is radically different from previous awakenings...This one is very, very different. It is about taking control of secular society.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not to know the Bible is, in some ways, to be illiterate, to neglect the very roots of philosophy, art, architecture, literature, poetry and music. It is to fall into a dangerous provincialism, as myopic and narrow as that embraced by those who say everything in the Bible is literally true and we do not need any other kind of intellectual or scientific inquiry. Doubt and belief are not, as biblical literalists claim, incompatible. Those who act without any doubt are frightening. (p8)”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p8)”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When used by the Christian Right, the term "liberty" means the liberty that comes with accepting a very narrowly conceived Christ and the binary world-view that acceptance promotes. (p15)”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The power brokers in the radical Christian Right have already moved from the fringes of society to the executive branch, the House of Representatives, the Senate and the courts. The movement has seized control of the Republican Party. (p22)”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the Christian Right and radical Islamists, although locked in a holy war, increasingly mirror each other. They share the same obsessions. They do not tolerate other forms of belief or disbelief. They are at war with artistic and cultural expression. They seek to silence the media. They call for the subjugation of women. They promote severe sexual repression, and they seek to express themselves through violence. (p24)”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As American history and the fundamentalist movement itself have changed, so have the objects of fundamentalist hatred. Believers were told a few decades ago that communists were behind the civil-rights movement, the antiwar movement and liberal groups such as the ACLU. They were racist and intolerant of African Americans, Jews and Catholics. Now the battle against communism has been reconfigured. The seat of Satan is no longer in the Kremlin. It has been assumed by individuals and institutions promoting a rival religion called "secular humanism." (p27)”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“radical movements expose their own intentions and goals by tarring their enemies with their own nefarious motives. These movements assume that those they attack are, like themselves, also hiding their true agenda, also plotting to silence and eradicate opponents. (p197)”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be judged by the state as an innocent, is to be guilty. It is to sanction, through passivity and obedience, the array of crimes carried out by the state.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Happy as a Hangman", Truthdig (December 6, 2010)
“When you spend that long on the outer reaches of empire, you understand the cruelty of empire ... and the lies we tell ourselves about what is done in our name.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interviewed by Bill Moyers, "Sits Down With Bill Moyers" Truthdig (July 22, 2012)
“But human beings matter little in the corporate state. We myopically serve the rapacious appetites of those dedicated to exploitation and maximizing profit. And our corporate masters view prisons — as they do education, health care and war — as a business.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Profiting From Human Misery", Truthdig (18 February 2013)
“My attitude toward becoming a vegan was similar to Augustine’s attitude toward becoming celibate — “God grant me abstinence, but not yet.” But with animal agriculture as the leading cause of species extinction, water pollution, ocean dead zones and , and with the death spiral of the ecosystem ever more pronounced, becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species. It is one that my wife — who was the engine behind our family’s shift — and I have made.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Saving the Planet, One Meal at a Time", Truthdig (10 November 2014)
“We’ve been saturated with cultural images and a kind of cultural deification of wealth and those who have wealth. They present people of immense wealth as somehow leaders, oracles even. We don’t grasp internally what an oligarchic class is finally about, or how venal and morally bankrupt they are. We need to recover the language of class warfare to grasp what is happening to us. And we need to shatter this self-delusion that somehow if, as Obama says, we work hard enough and study hard enough, we can be one of them.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interviewed by Paul Jay, “The Pathology of the Super-Rich” (23 Nov 2014)
“We live in an oligarchic state where we’ve been rendered utterly powerless. The judiciary, the legislative, the executive branch is all subservient to an oligarchic corporate elite. And the press is owned by an oligarchic corporate elite which makes sure that any critique of them is never broadcast over the airwaves.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interviewed by Paul Jay, “The Pathology of the Super-Rich” (23 Nov 2014)
“If you read the writings of anthropologists, there are studies about how civilizations break down; and we are certainly following that pattern. Unfortunately, there’s nothing within human nature to argue that we won’t go down the ways other civilizations have gone down. The difference is now, of course, that when we go down, the whole planet is going to go with us.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interviewed by Elias Isquith, "'We are in a revolutionary moment': Chris Hedges explains why an uprising is coming — and soon" Salon (June 4, 2015)
“The reality of empire rarely reaches the American public. The few atrocities that come to light are dismissed as isolated aberrations. The public is assured what has been uncovered will be investigated and will not take place again. The goals of empire, we are told by a subservient media and our ruling elites, are virtuous and noble. And the vast killing machine grinds forward, feeding, as it has always done, the swollen bank accounts of defense contractors and corporations that exploit natural resources and cheap labor around the globe.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The American Empire: Murder Inc." Truthdig (4 January 2016).
“This moment in American history is what Antonio Gramsci called the “interregnum”—the period when a discredited regime is collapsing but a new one has yet to take its place. There is no guarantee that what comes next will be better. But this space, which will close soon, offers citizens the final chance to embrace a new vision and a new direction.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Welcome to 1984" Truthdig (May 14, 2016)
“We are a society awash in skillfully manufactured lies. Solitude that makes thought possible—a removal from the electronic cacophony that besieges us—is harder and harder to find. We have severed ourselves from a print-based culture. We are unable to grapple with the nuances and complexity of ideas. We have traded ideas for fabricated clichés. We speak in the hollow language we are given by our corporate masters. Reality, presented to us as image, is unexamined and therefore false. We are culturally illiterate. And because of our cultural illiteracy we are easily manipulated and controlled.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the American Political Science Association, text published by [http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_intellectuals_we_abandon_20160904 Truthdig (September 3, 2016)
“You rebel not only for what you can achieve, but for who you become. In the end, those who rebel require faith — not a formal or necessarily Christian, Jewish or Muslim orthodoxy, but a faith that the good draws to it the good. That we are called to carry out the good insofar as we can determine what the good is.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are captive to systems of power until we can name the dominant myths and the intricate systems of coercion and control that extinguish our freedom.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the American Political Science Association, text published by Truthdig (September 3, 2016)
“As a foreign correspondent I covered collapsed societies... It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion. All the harbingers of collapse are visible... We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have seen this before. I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Coming Collapse", Common Dreams, (May 21, 2018)
“Neoliberalism transforms freedom for the many into freedom for the few. Its logical result is neofascism. Neofascism abolishes civil liberties in the name of national security and brands whole groups as traitors and enemies of the people. It is the militarized instrument used by the ruling elites to maintain control, divide and tear apart the society and further accelerate pillage and social inequality. The ruling ideology, no longer credible, is replaced with the jackboot.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism", (November 26, 2018).
“The brutality of our corporate executioners grows by the day. They will stop at nothing, including wholesale murder, to consolidate power and amass greater profits. Blinded by hubris, driven by greed, disdainful of democracy, foolishly believing their wealth will protect them, they will herd us over the cliff unless they are overthrown”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Delacroix was right. It is the struggle that matters. Not the outcome. I was where I should have been that Saturday in front of the Paris Opera House. Yes, our cries were not heard.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yes, it may be futile. But the fight is what makes us human. It gives us dignity. It affirms life in the face of death. “This eternal combat” brings with it, as the painter knew, a strange kind of consolation that lifts us up to the level of our despair.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Only the Struggle Matters", Truthdig (April 1, 2019)
“Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The United States ... celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The irony is that Barack Obama would not even be president if it were not for the courage of persecuted dissidents such as Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, spied upon by their own government. But Obama understands where power lies. It does not lie with the citizen. It lies with Wall Street and our corporate boardrooms, which have carried out a slow motion coup d’état. And a system of mass surveillance is designed to keep these elites in these boardrooms powerful and the rest of us powerless.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Moral courage means to defy the crowd, to stand up as a solitary individual, to shun the intoxicating embrace of comradeship, and to be disobedient to authority, even at the risk of your life, for a higher principle.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Moral courage ... is always defined by the state as treason. ... It is the courage to act and speak the truth. Thompson had it. Daniel Ellsburg had it. Malcolm X had it. Martin Luther King had it. What those in authority once said about them they say today about Snowden.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An omnipresent surveillance state ... makes democratic dissent impossible. Any state that has the ability to inflict full spectrum dominance on its citizens is not a free state.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The relationship between those who are constantly watched and tracked and those who watch and track them is the relationship between masters and slaves.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The government officials, along with the courtiers and the press, ... insist that congressional and judicial oversight, the right to privacy, the rule of law, the freedom of the press, the right to express dissent remains inviolate. They use the old words and old phrases, old laws and old constitutional guarantees, to give our corporate totalitarianism a democratic veneer.”
Chris Hedges (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source