Chris Hedges famous quotes

We've bought into the idea that education is about training and "success," defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.
-- Chris Hedges

#Education #Mistake #Thinking

Becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species.
-- Chris Hedges

#Important #Becoming #Vegan

Human beings can be redeemed. Empires cannot. Our refusal to face the truth about empire, our refusal to defy the multitudinous crimes and atrocities of empire, has brought about the nightmare Malcolm predicted. And as the Digital Age and our post-literate society implant a terrifying historical amnesia, these crimes are erased as swiftly as they are committed.
-- Chris Hedges

#Historical #Age #Faces

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

#Lying #Self #Deception

I will step outside the system. Voting for the “lesser evil”-or failing to vote at all-is part of the corporate agenda to crush what is left of our anemic democracy. And those who continue to participate in the vaudeville of a two-party process, who refuse to confront in every way possible the structures of corporate power, assure our mutual destruction.
-- Chris Hedges

#Crush #Party #Two

Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.
-- Chris Hedges

#Numbers #Revolutionary #Force

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

#Color #Years #Jail

We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor people out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power.
-- Chris Hedges

#Crush #War #Lying

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

#Expression #Leader #Democracy

The media propagates a message that corporations want, and there’s a belittling and mocking of the poor and celebration of wealth. A kind of cutthroat, rapacious capitalism is celebrated on reality television shows where you betray and manipulate and push aside your competitors for fleeting fame and money. These are sick values, but they’re disseminated through corporate media in almost every program you watch.
-- Chris Hedges

#Reality #Media #Sick

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

#Thinking #Needs #Roles

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

#Mean #Two #Justice

Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.
-- Chris Hedges

#Use #Disease #Violence

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

#Country #Giving Up #Military

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

#People #Political #Forgotten

One needs solitude and quiet to think. The cacophony of modern culture is designed to make that impossible...
-- Chris Hedges

#Thinking #Solitude #Needs

To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth-intellect ually and emotionally-and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.
-- Chris Hedges

#Struggle #Ecosystems #Understanding

A society without the means to detect lies and theft soon squanders its liberty and freedom.
-- Chris Hedges

#Lying #Mean #Liberty

Washington has become our Versailles. We are ruled, entertained, and informed by courtiers -- and the media has evolved into a class of courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are mostly courtiers. Our pundits and experts, at least those with prominent public platforms, are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose behind it is deception.
-- Chris Hedges

#Mirrors #Media #Games

The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.
-- Chris Hedges

#War #Addiction #Drug

Turn off your televisions. Ignore the Newt-Mitt-Rick- Barack reality show. It is as relevant to your life as the gossip on “Jersey Shore.” The real debate, the debate raised by the Occupy movement about inequality, corporate malfeasance, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the security and surveillance state, is the only debate that matters.
-- Chris Hedges

#Real #Ecosystems #Gossip

The true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.
-- Chris Hedges

#Careers #Mind #Purpose

In the beginning war looks and feels like love. But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb.
-- Chris Hedges

#War #Self #Giving

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

#Passion #Telling The Truth #Authority

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.
-- Chris Hedges

#War #Long #Giving

Most of these who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war.
-- Chris Hedges

#War #Perception #Impossible

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

#War #Grief #Honor

Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist. They have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained. The elite...know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don't expect them to save us. They don't know how....and when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being as helpless, and as self-deluded as the rest of us
-- Chris Hedges

#Jobs #War #Self

Positive psychology is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis
-- Chris Hedges

#Eugenics #Psychology #Nazi

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

#Objectivity #Essence #Promise

Battling evil, cruelty, and injustice allows us to retain our identity, a sense of meaning, and ultimately our freedom.
-- Chris Hedges

#Evil #Identity #Injustice

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

#Sports #Children #Soldier

We live in imaginary, virtual worlds created by corporations that profit from our deception.
-- Chris Hedges

#Deception #World #Corporations

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

#Thinking #Going Away #Fundamentals

The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.
-- Chris Hedges

#War #Next #Causes

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

#War #Iraq #Effort

War in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics.
-- Chris Hedges

#Peace #Betrayal #War

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

#Sports #Military #War

Most of these students are so conditioned to success that they become afraid to take risks. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools, and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead, and getting ahead means deference to authority. Challenging authority is never a career advancer.
-- Chris Hedges

#School #Mean #Careers

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

#Real #America #Intuition

They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn't like the smell of the poor.
-- Chris Hedges

#Smell #Academia #Poor

The violence of war is random. It does not make sense. And many of those who struggle with loss also struggle with the knowledge that the loss was futile and unnecessary.
-- Chris Hedges

#War #Struggle #Loss

The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.
-- Chris Hedges

#Atheist #Perfect #Doe

The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
-- Chris Hedges

#Self #Color #Doubt

I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers- historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state- all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.
-- Chris Hedges

#War #Dark #Years

War is addictive. Indeed, it is the most potent narcotic unleashed by mankind.
-- Chris Hedges

#Peace #War #Mankind

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

#War #Giving #Want

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

#Pain #Betrayal #Dark

This too is a jihad. Yet we Americans find ourselves in the dangerous position of going to war not against a state but against a phantom. The jihad we have embarked upon is targeting an elusive and protean enemy. The battle we have begun is never-ending. But it may be too late to wind back the heady rhetoric. We have embarked on a campaign as quixotic as the one mounted to destroy us.
-- Chris Hedges

#War #Wind #Enemy

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

#Country #Military #California

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

#Violence #Language #Speak

The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of preemptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. They were had. It is not a new story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill Clinton. It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding.
-- Chris Hedges

#War #Party #Fighting

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

#Country #Self #Retreat

The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism
-- Chris Hedges

#Evil #Empires #Terrorism

No real journalist makes $5 million a year... Those in power fear and dislike real journalists.
-- Chris Hedges

#Real #Years #Democracy

I don't fight fascists because I'll win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
-- Chris Hedges

#Fighting #Winning #Fascists

It's the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings… And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state.
-- Chris Hedges

#Creating #People #States

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

#Past #Years #Humans

Economics dominates politics - and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.
-- Chris Hedges

#Different #Ruthlessness #Economics

There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.
-- Chris Hedges

#People #Littles #Privilege

The arts often realize human truths well before other branches of human endeavor.
-- Chris Hedges

#Art #Branches #Realizing

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

#Wall #Insane #Culture

The few surviving Armenians no longer ask to go home. They do not ask for restitution. They ask simply to have the memory of their obliteration acknowledged. It is a moral obsession, the lonely legacy passed onto the third and fourth generation who no longer speak Armenian but who carry within them the seeds of resentment that will not be quashed.
-- Chris Hedges

#Lonely #Memories #Home

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

#Atheist #Angel #Discipline

The inability to grasp the pathology* of our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults.
-- Chris Hedges

#Inability #Faults #Pathology

Jesus was a pacifist.
-- Chris Hedges

#Jesus #Pacifist

As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of War our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence.
-- Chris Hedges

#War #Thinking #Long

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

#Hate #Self #Worship

In war, we always deform ourselves, our essence.
-- Chris Hedges

#War #Essence

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

#Hate #Get Better #Culture