Quotes from Chris Hedges

The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations, and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helping us distinguish lies from truth, and facilitate justice.

Bulgakov and Roth understood that there is no real political ideology among decayed ruling elites. Political debate and ideological constructs for these elites are just so much absurdist theater, a cynical species of public spectacle and mass entertainment. These systems, like our own, are organized kleptocracies.

By the 1920s, a once powerful and radical labor movement in the United States had been broken. Although it was revived with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s, it would be crushed again by World War II and the anticommunist hysteria that followed.

To be a rebel is to reject what it means to succeed in a capitalist, consumer culture, especially the idea that we should always come first.

Trump and today's Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism.

But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, then state violence can spawn reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls "terrorism." Violent uprisings are always tragic, and violent revolutions always empower revolutionaries, such as Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who are as ruthless as their adversaries. Violence inevitably becomes the principal form of coercion on both sides of the divide.

Many of America's policing techniques, including widespread surveillance, were pioneered and perfected in American colonies such as the Philippines before being introduced to police departments in the United States. Blacks in the South had to be controlled. Labor unions and radical socialists had to be broken.

We live in a system that is incapable of reforming itself. The first step to dismantling that system is to dismantle the ideas that give it legitimacy.

Technological advancement and wealth are conflated in capitalism with human progress. All aspects of human existence that cannot be measured or quantified—beauty, truth, love, grief, the search for meaning, and the struggle with our own mortality—are ignored and ridiculed.

The important point that Benjamin and Kant make is that revolutions, whether in art or in society, are about emotion. These moments engender not simply new ideas but new feelings about established power and human possibilities.

Many ideas, once held to be true, have come to be regarded as wrong and evil," Berkman wrote. Thus the ideas of the divine right of kings, of slavery and serfdom. There was a time when the whole world believed those institutions to be right, just, and unchangeable.

My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of happiness—when these things can be said," wrote Paine, "then may that country boast of its constitution and its government."30

Language," he wrote, "is both a product of history and possesses a history of its own.

The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar.

My husband had dementia," she told me softly. "I took care of him for six years with these two hands. For a few months the insurance gave me help. Certain medications they pay after six years. They told me once he couldn't swallow no more there was nothing we could do. . . . He died at home last year.

We have the facade of a functioning capitalist democracy but underneath it is a species of corporate totalitarianism.

Many yearn to be deceived and directed. It makes life easier to bear.

only three corporations—Cargill, Archers Daniel Midland Company, and Bunge (all American)—control 90 percent of the global grain trade.

The poor population in the United States—15 percent of the total population and a disturbing 21.8 percent for children under the age of eighteen—is expanding.

The right-wing Federalist Society, after its founding in 1982, unleashed a frontal assault on the legal system that has transformed it into a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate state.

Daniel Boorstin in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

W. Bush's life is a case study in the insidious affirmative action for the rich.

Corporate capitalism has made war on the communal and the sacred, on those forces that allow us to connect and transcend our temporal condition to bond with others. These bonds will be reestablished or we will slip further into a world where death is more attractive than life.

The day we signed the first agreement in the late fifties, I went from 90 cents an hour to a buck and a quarter," he recalled. "That 35 cents is what made me where I'm at today, still union. "If you really grasp unionism, you are a socialist," he said. "Because we're for the little people. Fair representation. Antidiscrimination. Wages. Benefits. It all comes hand in hand. There's strength in numbers.