Chris Hedges quotes - page 3

Chris Hedges is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent, renowned for his deep criticism of war and American foreign policy. His reporting and books often focus on issues of social justice, politics, and the consequences of conflict. He continues to be an influential public intellectual and activist, writing and speaking on matters of ethics, power, and resistance. Here are 105 of his quotes:

Hope will come with the return of the language of class conflict and rebellion, language that has been purged from the lexicon of the liberal class. This does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of working class enslavement, but we have to learn again to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good.

Chris Hedges

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

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.

Chris Hedges

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

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

The more communities break down and poverty expands, the more anxious and frightened people will retreat into self-delusion. Those who speak the truth-whether about climate change or our system of inverted totalitarianism-will be branded as seditious and unpatriotic. They will be hated for destroying the illusion. This, as Gabler noted, is the danger of a society dominated by entertainment. Such a society, he wrote, "... took dead aim at the intellectuals' most cherished values. That theme was the triumph of the senses over the mind, of emotion over reason, of chaos over order, or the id over the superego. ... Entertainment was Plato's worst nightmare. It deposed the rational and enthroned the sensational and in so doing deposed the intellectual minority and enthroned the unrefined majority.”.

Chris Hedges

Kevin Kruse in his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America details how industrialists in the 1930s and 1940s poured money and resources into an effort to silence the social witness of the mainstream church, which was home to many radicals, socialists and proponents of the New Deal. These corporatists promoted and funded a brand of Christianity-which is today dominant-that conflates faith with free enterprise and American exceptionalism. The rich are rich, this creed goes, not because they are greedy or privileged, not because they use their power to their own advantage, not because they oppress the poor and the vulnerable, but because they are blessed. And if we have enough faith, this heretical form of Christianity claims, God will bless the rest of us too. It is an inversion of the central message of the Gospel. You don't need to spend three years at Harvard Divinity School as I did to figure that out.

Chris Hedges

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

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

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

Contrary to the bunk we're told, the United States didn't land on Normandy and defeat Nazi Germany. The defeat of Nazi Germany was done primarily by the Soviet army.

Chris Hedges

It is used to demonize domestic critics and alternative media outlets as agents of a foreign power. It is used to paper over the Democratic Party's betrayal of the working class and the party's subservience to corporate power. It is used to discredit détente between the world's two largest nuclear powers. It is used to justify both the curtailment of civil liberties in the United States and U.S. interventions overseas-including in countries such as Syria and Venezuela.

Chris Hedges

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

WikiLeaks and Assange have done more to expose the dark machinations and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. Assange, in addition to exposing atrocities and crimes committed by the United States military in our endless wars and revealing the inner workings of the Clinton campaign, made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency, their surveillance programs and their interference in foreign elections...And WikiLeaks worked swiftly to save Edward Snowden, who exposed the wholesale surveillance of the American public by the government, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow...

Chris Hedges

Most Americans – regardless of whether they were once on the left or right – have become politically disempowered and economically insecure. Nowadays it's the boardwalk versus private jets on their way to the Hamptons.

Chris Hedges

Trump's most unforgivable sin in the eyes of the deep state is his criticism of the empire's endless wars, even though he lacks the intellectual and organizational skills to oversee a disengagement.

Chris Hedges

Our democracy is not in peril-we do not live in a democracy. The image of our democracy is in peril. The deep state-the generals, bankers, corporatists, lobbyists, intelligence chiefs, government bureaucrats and technocrats-is intent on salvaging the brand. It is hard to trumpet yourself as the world's guardian of freedom and liberty with Donald Trump blathering on incoherently about himself, inciting racist violence, insulting our traditional allies along with the courts, the press and Congress, tweeting misspelled inanities and impulsively denouncing or sabotaging bipartisan domestic and foreign policy.

Chris Hedges

Most war correspondents, for the first twenty-four hours, think they learn their job from movies until they get shot at.

Chris Hedges

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

What is happening to Assange should terrify the press...The silence about the treatment of Assange is not only a betrayal of him but a betrayal of the freedom of the press itself. We will pay dearly for this complicity.... Assange is on his own. Each day is more difficult for him. This is by design. It is up to us to protest. We are his last hope, and the last hope, I fear, for a free press.

Chris Hedges

Rape, mutilation, abuse, and theft are the natural outcome of a world in which force rules, in which human beings are objects.

Chris Hedges

We now live in what the German political scientist Ernst Fränkl called the dual state. Totalitarian states are always dual states. ... The outward forms of democracy, of democratic participation, voting, competing political parties, judicial oversight and legislation remain, but are hollow political stagecraft. And Fränkl called those who wield this unchecked power over the citizenry "the prerogative state.” The masses in a totalitarian structure live in what he termed "the normative state.”.

Chris Hedges