Quotes from Chris Hedges

The vast distance between perceived reality and the official version of reality is characteristic of totalitarian systems. The state abolishes liberty and rights while claiming to uphold and defend them.

I do not know if we can build a better society. I do not even know if we will survive as a species. But I do know that these corporate forces have us by the throat. And they have my children by the throat. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.

Writing of Ohio megachurch pastor Rod Parsley and his close associate, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell, he says, "[T]he heart of the Christian religion, all that is good and compassionate within it, has been tossed aside, ruthlessly gouged out and thrown into a heap with all the other inner organs. Only the shell, the form, remains. Christianity is of no use to Parsley, Blackwell and the others. In its name they kill it.

The state has never opposed the widespread public ownership of guns because these weapons have rarely been deployed against the state.

You know, I come out of the church. I not only grew up in the church but graduated from seminary, and I look at this as a mass movement. I give it very little religious legitimacy, especially the extreme wing of it.

The sheer size of the country, the mixed ethnic, religious, and racial composition of the people, and the diffuseness of power under our federal system have all tended to blunt or minimize citizen-versus-state conflicts and to throw citizen-versus-citizen conflicts into high relief.

Any revolution, once begun, carries the potential for fanaticism. Revolutionaries in power can erect, in the name of a glorious utopian ideal, a system of state terror, as demonstrated by the Leninists and Stalinists, the ideological heirs of the French Jacobins.

When a nation becomes unmoored from reality, it retreats into a world of magic. Facts are accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained cosmology. The search for truth becomes irrelevant.

as Plato and his pupil Aristotle understood, the building of empire, any empire, extinguishes democracy. Empire requires a centralized bureaucracy. Its complexity mandates a permanent caste of bureaucrats and military leaders who strip the citizenry of power.

Moral courage is the courage to act and to speak the truth.

We are not a people with a revolutionary or an insurrectionary tradition. The War of Independence, while it borrowed the rhetoric of revolution, replaced a foreign oligarchy with a native, slaveholding oligarchy.

Aristotle warned that in a democracy, there always existed the potential for the poor to seize the property of the rich. Democracy, Aristotle wrote, could not coexist with huge levels of inequality. Everyone had to have a stake in society. There were other responses to Aristotle's understanding, including from Athenian tyrants and later James Madison, who urged government to reduce democracy and cripple the political power of the working class.

A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion.

Since our violence did not typically begin with anyone's desire to subvert the state, it did not typically end by undermining the legitimacy of authority," Hofstadter writes.20 The federal structure, as Hofstadter notes, has effectively diverted violence away from symbols of national power to regional or state authority.

Miller captures in the play the darkest pathology of white America—the inability to accept who we are, where we came from, acknowledge and take responsibility for the crimes we committed and with that understanding access where we are going and who we want to become. The danger of self-delusion is the central point of Miller's play.

The sentencing of Manning marked the day when the state formally declared that all who name and expose its crimes will become political prisoners or will be forced, like Snowden, to flee into exile.

Collapse created a dreamworld "where men live fighting one another about elaborate shadows and quarreling for power, as if that were a great prize."116 Once caught up in the frenzied Danse Macabre, it became impossible to escape until, as it always does, death worked its dark magic, dooming a once vibrant civilization to extinction.

It was a potent reminder why most European states and America live in such opulence and determine the fate of so many others. We equip and train the most efficient killers on the planet.

The attacks by this movement on the rights and beliefs of Muslims, Jews, immigrants, gays, lesbians, women, scholars, scientists, those they dismiss as nominal Christians, and those they brand with the curse of secular humanist, are an attack on all of us, on our values, our freedoms and ultimately our democracy. Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.

Corporate totalitarianism, for me, is interchangeable with inverted totalitarianism, as Wolin uses that term throughout his book.

shutdown your electronic hallucinations. Turn off Facebook, don't put anything in your ears, throw out your TV. I don't Tweet. You have to read!

Once oligarchs achieve unchecked economic and political power, as they have in the United States, the citizens too become disposable. And that, in the eyes of the elite, is what we are.

the sack of kittens sinking in the icy creek increases the cold

As long as the powers that be are in control, the oppression isn't going to go anywhere," he said. "It's really going to take people to unite worldwide, not just in America, not just in St. Louis, not just in one particular city or state. It's gonna have to be people identifying their struggles with each other worldwide, internationally, and say enough is enough. That's the only way oppression will ever leave.