Top 100 Chris Hedges Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Chris Hedges

Featured in: Inspirational Career Quotes, Teaching Quotes

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

— Chris Hedges

3. “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

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

— Chris Hedges

5. “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

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. “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

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

— Chris Hedges

9. “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

10. “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

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

— Chris Hedges

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

— Chris Hedges

13. “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

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

— Chris Hedges

15. “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

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

— Chris Hedges

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

— Chris Hedges

18. “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

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

— Chris Hedges

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

— Chris Hedges

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “The cri de coeur of this lost generation, orphans of global capitalism, rises up from deindustrialized cities across the nation. This generation has been cast aside by a society that views them as cogs, menial wage slaves who will do the drudgery that plagues the working poor in postindustrial America.”

— Chris Hedges

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

— Chris Hedges

26. “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

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

— Chris Hedges

28. “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

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

— Chris Hedges

30. “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

31. “All cults are personality cults. All cults are really extensions of whoever the cult leader is. So, whatever the prejudices, the worldview and the ideas of the cult leader are they will be chanted back at him by the crowd. Until massive social and economic inequality as well as the betrayal of the country by the elite are confronted and remedied, this yearning for a cult leader will not go away. Desperate people are looking for somebody to save them.”

— Chris Hedges

32. “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

33. “We are in the grip of what Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death” – the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement.”

— Chris Hedges

34. “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

35. “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

36. “The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.”

— Chris Hedges

37. “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

38. “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

39. “We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which 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

40. “The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic.”

— Chris Hedges

41. “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.”

— Chris Hedges

42. “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

43. “Economics dominates politics – and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”

— Chris Hedges

44. “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

45. “Permanent War One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun. – REINHOLD NIEBUHR, Beyond Tragedy.”

— Chris Hedges

46. “What is at work in this report is the reduction of language to code. Cliches, coined by the state, become the only acceptable vocabulary. Everyone knows what to say and how to respond. It is scripted. Vocabulary shrinks so that the tyranny of nationalist rhetoric leaves people sputtering state-sanctioned slogans.”

— Chris Hedges

47. “Aristotle said that only two living entities are capable of complete solitude and complete separateness: God and beast. Because of this the most acute form of suffering for human beings is loneliness.”

— Chris Hedges

48. “The difficult task of learning how to make moral choices, how to accept personal responsibility, how to deal with the chaos of human life is handed over to God-like authority figures. The process makes possible a perpetuation of childhood. It allows the adult to bask in the warm glow and magic of divine protection. It.”

— Chris Hedges

49. “The mantra of the “least worse” does not work – look at the steady deterioration in American politics. The “least worst” paves the way for the worst.”

— Chris Hedges

50. “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