Quotes from Chris Hedges

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

There are no impediments now to corporations. None. And what they want is for us to give up. They want us to become passive. They want us to become tacitly complicit in our own destruction.

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

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 rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.

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

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

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.

We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe.

Jesus was a pacifist.

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

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

Just remember,' a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel told me as he strapped his pistol belt under his arm before we crossed into Kuwait, 'that none of these boys is fighting for home, for the flag, for all that crap the politicians feed the public. They are fighting for each other, just for each other.

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.

Racism towards Muslims is as evil as anti-Semitism, but try to express this simple truth on a partisan Palestinian or Israeli website.

This magical thinking, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity. … It has turned whole nations, such as the United States, into self-consuming machines of death.

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.