Quotessence
Home / Authors / Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllWarStatesCorporateHumansPeopleWorldCorporationsKindSelfThinkingDemocracyPurposeCultureDoeMoralRealityWantDestructionGivingHas Beens

Famous Chris Hedges Quotes

“If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining… The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.”

WarTruthMediaPatriotismCensorship
Book:Death of the Liberal Class
Create image

“The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison - just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live. We can not succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral. We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world’s genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not. We stood by and watched the slaughter in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda where a million people died. The blood for the victims of Srebrenica- a designated UN safe area in Bosnia- is on our hands. The generation before mine watched, with much the same passivity, the genocides of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and the Ukraine. These slaughters were, as in, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Chronical of a Death Foretold, often announced in advance”

WarViolenceMoralityEthicsGenocideMorals
Book:War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Create image

“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. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. And those who have the least meaning in their lives, the impoverished refugees in Gaza, the disenfranchised North African immigrants in France, even the legions of young who live in the splendid indolence and safety of the industrialized world, are all susceptible to war's appeal.”

WarPoliticsForceMeaningPurpose Of Life
Book:War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Create image

“Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours, is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver. It reduces and at times erases the anxiety of individual consciousness. We abandon individual responsibility for a shared, unquestioned communal enterprise, however morally dubious.”

WarPurposeMeaningNationalism
Book:War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Create image

“War is necrophilia. And this necrophilia is central to soldiering, just as it is central to the makeup of suicide bombers and terrorists. The necrophilia is hidden under platitudes about duty or comradeship. It awaits, especially in moments when we seem to have little to live for and no hope, or in moments when the intoxication of war is at its pitch, to be unleashed. When we spend long enough in war it comes to us as a kind of release, a fatal and seductive embrace that can consummate the long flirtation in war with our own destruction. The ancient Greeks had a word for such a drive. They called it ekpyrosis - to be consumed by a ball of fire. They used the word to describe heroes.”

WarSelf DestructionEkpyrosis
Book:War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Create image

“We believe in the nobility of self-sacrifice demanded by war, especially when we are blinded by the narcotic of war. We discover in the communal struggle, the shared sense of meaning and purpose, a cause. War fills our spiritual void. I do not miss war, but I miss what it brought. I can never say that I was happy in the midst of the fighting in El Salvador, or in Bosnia, or Kosova, but I had a sense of purpose, of calling. And this is a quality war shares with love, for we are, in love, also able to choose fealty and self-sacrifice over security.”

LoveWarPurposeMeaning
Book:War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Create image

“Happiness is elusive and protean. And it is sterile when devoid of meaning. But meaning, when it is set in the vast arena of war with its high stakes, it’s adrenaline-driven rushes, it’s bold sweeps and drama, is heartless and self-destructive. The initial selflessness of war mirrors that of love, the chief emotion war destroys. And this is what war often looks and feels like, at it’s inception: love.”

LoveWarMeaningErosThanatos
Book:War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Create image

“Historical memory is hijacked by those who carry out war. They seek, when the memory challenges the myth, to obliterate or hide the evidence that exposes the myth as a life. The destruction is pervasive, aided by an establishment, including the media, which apes the slogans and euphemisms parroted by the powerful. Because nearly everyone in wartime is complicit, it is difficult for societies to confront their own culpability and the life that led to it.”

WarHistorical Memory
Book:War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Create image

“I think most generations tend to learn the lesson of war the hard way. There is a deep attraction to the empowerment. Freud is right: societies either become locked in a collective embrace of Eros, as individuals do, or a collective embrace of Thanatos, the death instinct. They swing between the two. The notion that societies are naturally prone toward self-preservation is wrong. Self-annihilation can be deeply addictive, intoxicating, enticing. So I take a darker view of human nature, that war is probably always going to be with us. I think history bears me out.”

ThinkingWayHumansTwoWarSelfHardIndividualViewsGenerationsHuman NatureBearsLessonsEmpowermentEmbraceInstinctNotionAttractionCollectivesSwingsLockedPreservationAnnihilationSelf PreservationErosHard WayEnticingThanatos
Author:Chris Hedges
Create image

“In my second year of Harvard Divinity School, where I was studying to be a minister like my father, I met a guy named Robert Cox, who had been the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald during the Dirty War in Argentina. Bob used to print the names of those who had been disappeared the day before, above the fold in his newspaper. It was a kind of an awakening to me to see what great journalism can and should do.”

ShouldYearsKindWarSchoolUsedGuyFatherNamesStudyMetsAwakeningNewspapersJournalismDirtyMinistersDivinityPrintEditorsBobFoldsHarvardArgentinaBuenos Aires
Author:Chris Hedges
Create image

“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.”

PeopleMenWarHomeLyingDiesSocialJusticePoorCommonEconomyMovementWorshipMen And WomenConcernedProgramProfitMaking MoneyUselessCorporationsPoisonCrushGutsAdamAssistancePoor PeopleTrashExploitsEcosystemsCommon GoodTreasuryGlobal EconomyPublic EducationPlunderWorking ManMoney And Power
Author:Chris Hedges
Create image

“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.”

NeedsGivingMeanWarCountryGovernmentAsksFearSecretLibertyRightsSecurityMilitaryWillingPromiseGiving UpProfitSpendingPermanentCorporationsPermitImpositionGovernment SpendingLivestock
Book:Death of the Liberal Class
Create image

“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.”

WorldGivingFeelsLooksDoeWarSelfHardGreaterAchieveReturnHigherDemandDestructionDependenceThrillNumbDoseOutside WorldSelf DestructionLike LoveNarcotics
Book:War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Create image

“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.”

ThinkingShouldLongWarViolenceFailingBattleCapacityFulfillmentWho We AreExuberance
Book:War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Create image

“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.”

YearsDoeWarStatesFormCultureUniverseDarkChanceQualityBattleDrugAddictionFantasticNovelistsExcitementFilmmakerStationsHistorianBizarreRise AboveGrotesque
Book:War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Create image

“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.”

MayWarStatesEnemyDangerousPositionWindBattleLateCampaignsToo LateRhetoricElusivePhantomsNever EndingJihadGoing To WarQuixotic
Book:War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Create image

“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”

PeopleKnowsWarEndsSelfJobsDiesKnow HowStructureUniversityDefeatFinancialBeastAssetsExposedGraduatesElitesCollapseHelplessHumiliationWorthlessRottenDeludedFinancial System
Author:Chris Hedges
Create image

“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.”

WantWellsHas BeensWarEndsStoriesRealityCareFightingPoliticsIndividualEnergyChallengesPartyLibertyEconomyGroupsBillsDemocraticClintonDemocratRoundsDoctrineCorporatePermanentBrandingWho CaresDemocratic PartyMerryCivil LibertiesMerry Go RoundSustainable EnergySad RealityMalfeasanceGroups And Individuals
Author:Chris Hedges
Create image