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Chris Hedges Quotes (1956-)
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About Chris Hedges
Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American journalist, Presbyterian minister, and visiting Princeton University lecturer. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. In 2002, Hedges was one of eight reporters at The New York Times collectively awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He hosted the television program On Contact for RT America from 2016 to 2022
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“We spend $100 billion a year on intelligence, surveillance, and 70% goes to private contractors....”
“Most of these who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war.”
“The government is committed to spending $348 billion over the next decade to modernize nuclear weapons....”
“Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.”
“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.”
“The relationship between those who are constantly watched and tracked and those who watch and track them is the relationship between masters and slaves.”
“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.”
“Israel is not exercising “the right to defend itself” in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder, aided and abetted by the U.S.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“[pp 40-41] The opioid crisis, the mass shootings, the rising rates of suicide, especially among middle-age white males, the morbid obesity... magical thinking... the Christian Right....”
“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)”
“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.”
“The bloated military, sucking the marrow out of the nation, is unassailable. Poverty is a nightmare for half the population. Poor people of color are gunned down with impunity in the streets.”
“This deadly impasse, the tightening of the corporate totalitarian noose, would have continued if Snowden had not jolted the nation awake by disclosing the massive crimes of the prerogative state.”
“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)”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 Quotes by Topic
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Chris Hedges on Class conflict 5 quotes
“The class warfare is global. Not until workers in sweatshops in China, Mexico, Cambodia, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh are lifted out of poverty will the American working class be lifted out of poverty. This class war is the real fight, which corporate-owned media platforms and bankrupt liberals refuse to discuss.”
Chris Hedges on Education in the United States 4 quotes
“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 on Surveillance 3 quotes
“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 on Identity politics 3 quotes
“The liberal class has retreated into boutique activism where issues of class, capitalism and militarism are jettisoned for “cancel culture,” multiculturalism and identity politics.”
Chris Hedges on Truth 3 quotes
“Moral courage ... is always defined by the state as treason. ... It is the courage to act and speak the truth. Thompson had it. Daniel Ellsberg 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 on Democracy 3 quotes
“Democracy, in this late stage of capitalism, has been replaced with a system of legalized bribery. All branches of government, including the courts, along with the systems of entertainment and news, are wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state. Electoral politics are elaborate puppet shows.”
Chris Hedges on Gaza war 3 quotes
“Israel’s distorted, settler colonial visage is our own. We pretend otherwise. We ascribe to ourselves virtues and civilizing qualities that are, as in Israel, flimsy justifications for stripping an occupied and besieged people of their rights, seizing their land and using prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, enforced poverty and murder to keep them subjugated.”
Chris Hedges on Foreign policy of the United States 3 quotes
“Terror, intimidation and violence are the glue that holds empire together. Aerial bombardment, drone and missile attacks, artillery and mortar strikes, targeted assassinations, massacres, the detention of tens of thousands, death squad killings, torture, wholesale surveillance, extraordinary renditions, curfews, propaganda, a loss of civil liberties and pliant political puppets are the grist of our wars and proxy wars.”
Chris Hedges on Alternative media 3 quotes
“The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and their obsequious courtiers in the media, are illegitimate. Say this simple truth and you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins of the media landscape. Prove this truth, as Julian, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden have by allowing us to peer into the inner workings of power, and you are hunted down and persecuted.”
Chris Hedges on War 2 quotes
“Most of these who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war.”
Chris Hedges on Activism 2 quotes
“What we are seeing now in America is about so much more than people just being sick of the police murdering innocent people. It is a generational and class revolt.”
Chris Hedges on Totalitarianism 2 quotes
“Societies such as ours that once had democratic traditions or periods when relative openness was possible are often the most easily seduced into totalitarian systems because those who rule and build totalitarian structures continue to pay outward fealty to the ideals, practices and forms of the old system.”
What Chris Hedges Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Chris Hedges shared regarding contemporaries.
Chris Hedges on Edward Snowden 4 quotes
“[Snowden] has joined the ranks of the hunted and the persecuted because he named and documented the crimes of the state. His defiance of the control and monitoring of our lives by the security and surveillance makes him an American hero.”
Chris Hedges on Nancy Pelosi 2 quotes
“I don't think people are buying such a performance. I also don't believe that people are buying Pelosi's little kente-cloth, "take a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter" trick either....”
Chris Hedges on Noam Chomsky 2 quotes
“Its power to write its own laws and regulations, Chomsky points out, has ultimately created a mafia economic system and a mafia political system that is exemplified in the rise to power of the demagogue Donald Trump.”
Chris Hedges on Bernie Sanders 2 quotes
“The big corporate Democratic Party donors made it clear that if Bernie Sanders became the presidential nominee, they would support Trump. The donor class has created a system where they cannot fail. If it's Trump or Biden, Goldman Sachs doesn't lose, ExxonMobil doesn't lose, Raytheon doesn't lose, Citibank doesn't lose. There is no way that they can lose. They have rigged the system so that their interests are always served.”
Chris Hedges on Benito Mussolini
Chris Hedges on Ralph Nader
“Ralph Nader's Breaking Through Power is a brilliant analysis of corporate power and the popular mechanisms that can be used to wrest back our democracy”
Chris Hedges on Amy Goodman
“Amy Goodman is one of the most important voices in America. Her integrity and honesty remind us that a culture that cannot distinguish between illusion and reality dies.”
Chris Hedges on Jeff Bezos
“Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, whose corporation Amazon paid no federal taxes last year, alone added $34.6 billion to his personal wealth since the pandemic started.”
Chris Hedges on Al Gore
“the valiant struggle by former Vice President Al Gore and others to wake us up to the impending catastrophe that will beset us if we do not curb global warming is an act of faith.”
Chris Hedges on Mitch McConnell
“Mitch McConnell and the other elites really have not figured out what is happening in this moment of great crisis and upheaval. What we are seeing now in America is about so much more than people just being sick of the police murdering innocent people. It is a generational and class revolt.”
Chris Hedges on Karl Marx
“Marx was keenly aware of capitalism's ability to innovate and adapt. But he also knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we witness the denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of globalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as capitalism's most prescient and important critic.”
Chris Hedges on Eugene V. Debs
“Eugene Victor Debs, whose home is an infrequently visited museum on the campus of Indiana State University, was arguably the most important political figure of the 20th century. He built the socialist movement in America and was eventually crucified by the capitalist class when he and hundreds of thousands of followers became a potent political threat.”
Quotes About Chris Hedges
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Bessel van der Kolk on Chris Hedges
“One of the things that struck my colleague Mark Greenberg and me when we ran therapy groups for Vietnam combat veterans was how, despite their feelings of horror and grief, many of them seemed to come to life when they talked about their helicopter crashes and their dying comrades. (Former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges, who covered a number of brutal conflicts, entitled his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.)”
About Chris Hedges
Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American journalist, Presbyterian minister, and visiting Princeton University lecturer. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. In 2002, Hedges was one of eight reporters at The New York Times collectively awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He hosted the television program On Contact for RT America from 2016 to 2022