Chris Hedges Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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.

We have been very effectively pacified by the pernicious ideology of a consumer society that is centered on the cult of the self - an undiluted hedonism and narcissism. That has become a very effective way to divert our attention while the country is reconfigured into a kind of neofeudalism, with a rapacious oligarchic elite and an anemic government that no longer is able to intercede on behalf of citizens but cravenly serves the interests of the oligarchy itself.

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

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

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

The purpose of bread and circuses is, as Neil Postman said in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, to distract, to divert emotional energy towards the absurd and the trivial and the spectacle while you are ruthlessly stripped of power.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death.

Legitimate rage on the part of working men and women is directed not only towards government but, I think quite correctly, towards liberals, who speak in a very hypocritical language about caring for their interests and yet support institutions that carry out an assault against working men and women.

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

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

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

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."

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.

Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.

Positive psychology is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis

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.

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.

We've become the most eavesdropped, monitored, spied on, photographed population in human history, dwarfing anything that was done by the Stasi state and East Germany. And that's all been - you know, these are all the sacrifices that we supposedly have to make to make ourselves safe.