Top 100 Chris Hedges Quotes (2023 Update)

1. “The true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.”

— Chris Hedges

Featured in: Quotes About Careers

2. “I don’t fight fascists because I’ll win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.”

— Chris Hedges

3. “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”

— Chris Hedges

4. “The purpose of bread and circuses is, as Neil Postman said in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, to distract, to divert emotional energy towards the absurd and the trivial and the spectacle while you are ruthlessly stripped of power.”

— Chris Hedges

5. “It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance ; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt.”

— Chris Hedges

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

— Chris Hedges

7. “There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege, it will always be at the expense of truth and justice.”

— Chris Hedges

8. “The charade of politics is to make voters think that the personal narrative of the candidate affects the operation of the corporate state. It doesn’t really matter on the fundamental issues whether the President is Republican or Democratic.”

— Chris Hedges

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

— Chris Hedges

10. “Battling evil, cruelty, and injustice allows us to retain our identity, a sense of meaning, and ultimately our freedom.”

— Chris Hedges

11. “The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.”

— Chris Hedges

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

— Chris Hedges

13. “I have seen children shot in El Salvador, Algeria, Guatemala, Sarajevo, but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”

— Chris Hedges

14. “Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.”

— Chris Hedges

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

— Chris Hedges

16. “War in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics.”

— Chris Hedges

17. “The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism.”

— Chris Hedges

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

— Chris Hedges

19. “A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”

— Chris Hedges

20. “I’m not saying we’re going to win. I am saying rebellion becomes a way to protect your own dignity. Corporations are, theologically speaking, institutions of death. They commodify everything – the natural world, human beings – that they exploit until exhaustion or collapse. They know no limits.”

— Chris Hedges

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

— Chris Hedges

22. “Positive psychology is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis.”

— Chris Hedges

23. “It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.”

— Chris Hedges

24. “We live in imaginary, virtual worlds created by corporations that profit from our deception.”

— Chris Hedges

25. “Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers.”

— Chris Hedges

26. “The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief.”

— Chris Hedges

27. “Totalitarian states use propaganda to orchestrate historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. The object is to make sure the populace does not remember what it means to be free. And once a population does not remember what it means to be free, it does not react when freedom is stripped from it.”

— Chris Hedges

28. “Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”

— Chris Hedges

29. “The violent subjugation of the Palestinians, Iraqis, and Afghans will only ensure that those who oppose us will increasingly speak to us in the language we speak to them – violence.”

— Chris Hedges

30. “The belief that rational and quantifiable disciplines such as science can be used to perfect human society is no less absurd than a belief in magic, angels, and divine intervention.”

— Chris Hedges

31. “There was in the House only one dissenting vote, from Barbara J. Lee, a Democrat from California, who warned that military action could not guarantee the safety of the country and that ’as we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.”

— Chris Hedges

32. “What kind of a world are we going to leave the next generation? I, at least, want my children to look back and say, “My daddy was being arrested at the White House fence and booed off commencement stages. He was trying.””

— Chris Hedges

33. “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.”

— Chris Hedges

34. “It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate state needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role it refuses to permit intellectuals to think or function independently.”

— Chris Hedges

35. “The imperial projects will continue, Wall Street will be unimpeded in its malfeasance and criminal activity, social programs will continue to be cut, maybe not at the same speed as under a Republican Administration, but it’s all headed in the same direction.”

— Chris Hedges

36. “Those who suffer from historical amnesia, the belief that we are unique in history and have nothing to learn from the past, remain children. They live in an illusion.”

— Chris Hedges

37. “Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jail and prisons, however, they can each generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year.”

— Chris Hedges

38. “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.”

— Chris Hedges

39. “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.”

— Chris Hedges

40. “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.”

— Chris Hedges

41. “The more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world.”

— Chris Hedges

42. “Becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species.”

— Chris Hedges

43. “War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.”

— Chris Hedges

44. “One needs solitude and quiet to think. The cacophony of modern culture is designed to make that impossible...”

— Chris Hedges

45. “The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.”

— Chris Hedges

46. “Political leaders, who use the tools of mass propaganda to create a sense of faux intimacy with citizens, no longer need to be competent, sincere, or honest. They need only to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they need a story, a personal narrative.”

— Chris Hedges

47. “We on the left have forgotten that the question is not how do you get good people to rule, most people who rule are mediocre at best and usually venal. The question is how do we make those in power frightened of us and not be seduced by formal political processes.”

— Chris Hedges

48. “Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction.”

— Chris Hedges

49. “People don’t want the illusion of their manufactured personalities, their political saviors, shattered; personalities created by public relations industries. They don’t want to do the hard work of truly understanding how power works and organizing to bring it down.”

— Chris Hedges

50. “Again, although I’m not a particularly religious person, I go back to the religious left that I come out of: There are moral imperatives to fight back. As Daniel Berrigan says, “We’re called to do the good.” And then we have to let it go. It’s not our job to know where the good goes.”

— Chris Hedges