Top 100 Chris Hedges Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Chris Hedges

52. “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

53. “The cable news channels have cleverly seized on the creed of objectivity and redefined it in populist terms. They attack news based on verifiable fact for its liberal bias, for, in essence, failing to be objective, and promise a return to genuine objectivity.”

— Chris Hedges

54. “The potency of myth is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. It gives a justification to what is often nothing more than gross human cruelty and stupidity. It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our powerlessness.”

— Chris Hedges

55. “Force,” Simone Weil wrote, “is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.”2.”

— Chris Hedges

56. “Human kindness is deeply subversive to totalitarian creeds, which seek to thwart all compassion toward those deemed unworthy of moral consideration, those branded as internal or external enemies.”

— Chris Hedges

57. “As long as personal, violent catharsis masquerades as acts of resistance, the corporate state is secure. Indeed, the corporate state welcomes this violence because violence is a language it can speak with a proficiency and ruthlessness that none of these groups can match.”

— Chris Hedges

58. “We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe.”

— Chris Hedges

59. “The elite, and those who work for them, were never taught how to question the assumptions of their age. The socially important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at their core subversive and threatening to authority, have been banished from public discourse.”

— Chris Hedges

60. “Money has replaced the vote.”

— Chris Hedges

61. “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

62. “The arts often realize human truths well before other branches of human endeavor.”

— Chris Hedges

63. “Fascism is aided and advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of being conned and lied to by a bankrupt liberal establishment, whose only reason to vote for a politician or support a political party is to elect the least worst. This, for many voters, is the best Clinton can offer.”

— Chris Hedges

64. “Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.”

— Chris Hedges

65. “Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective.”

— Chris Hedges

66. “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

67. “As the economy unravels, as hundreds of millions of Americans confront the fact that things will not get better, life for those targeted by this culture of hate will become increasingly difficult. Rational debate will prove useless.”

— Chris Hedges

68. “Real life, our own life, is viewed next to the lives of celebrities as inadequate and inauthentic.”

— Chris Hedges

69. “The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.”

— Chris Hedges

70. “Lies are considered true. Truth is considered seditious.”

— Chris Hedges

71. “They failed to grasp the central Socratic paradox: that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.”

— Chris Hedges

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

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

— Chris Hedges

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “Jesus was a pacifist.”

— Chris Hedges

83. “Prisons are prototypes for the future, an example of the disempowerment and exploitation corporations seek to inflict on all workers.”

— Chris Hedges

84. “Most of these who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war.”

— Chris Hedges

85. “The historian Will Durant calculated that there have only been twenty-nine years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere.”

— Chris Hedges

86. “All you have to do is work hard, obey the rules, and believe in yourself. This myth is disseminated across the political spectrum. It is the essential message peddled by everyone from Oprah and the entertainment industry to the Christian Right and positive psychologists. But this promise, as the masses of underemployed and unemployed are discovering, is a fiction.16.”

— Chris Hedges

87. “No one who lives under constant surveillance, who is subject to detention anywhere at any time, whose conversations, proclivities, and habits are recorded, stored, and analyzed, can be described as free.”

— Chris Hedges

88. “A culture,” the poet W. H. Auden observed, “is no better than its woods.”

— Chris Hedges

89. “Those of us who are condemned as radicals, idealists, and dreamers call for basic reforms that, if enacted, would make peaceful reform possible. But corporate capitalists, now unchecked by state power and dismissive of the popular will, do not see the fires they are igniting.”

— Chris Hedges

90. “In war, we always deform ourselves, our essence.”

— Chris Hedges

91. “All of the movements that opened up the democratic space in America – the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor movement, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists, and the civil rights movement – developed a critical mass and militancy that forced the centers of power to respond. The platitudes about justice, equality, and democracy are just that. Only when ruling elites become worried about survival do they react. Appealing to the better nature of the powerful is useless.”

— Chris Hedges

92. “This too is a jihad. Yet we Americans find ourselves in the dangerous position of going to war not against a state but against a phantom. The jihad we have embarked upon is targeting an elusive and protean enemy. The battle we have begun is never-ending. But it may be too late to wind back the heady rhetoric. We have embarked on a campaign as quixotic as the one mounted to destroy us.”

— Chris Hedges

93. “The citizen has become irrelevant. He or she can participate in heavily choreographed elections, but the demands of corporations and banks are paramount.”

— Chris Hedges

94. “When facts are treated as if they were opinions, when there is no universal standard by which to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in the reporting of events of the day, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe, where there is no possibility of reaching any conclusion not predetermined by those who interpret the official, divinely inspired text.”

— Chris Hedges

95. “Until there is a common vocabulary and a shared historical memory, there is no peace in any society, only an absence of war... The search for a common narrative must, at times, be forced upon a society. Few societies seem able to do this willingly.”

— Chris Hedges

96. “The superior force of despotic regimes is disarmed not through violence but through conversion.”

— Chris Hedges

97. “In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with virtue.”

— Chris Hedges

98. “It wasn’t a direct route. I began as a freelance reporter. That’s an important distinction, because people who rise through the ranks of The New York Times become vetted, conditioned, harassed, and shaped by the institution. That never happened to me.”

— Chris Hedges

99. “Some 8,000 nonviolent Occupy protesters were arrested across the nation. Not one banker or investor went to jail for causing the 2008 financial meltdown.”

— Chris Hedges

100. “Scratch the surface of the survivalist cult in the United States and you expose terrified white supremacists.”

— Chris Hedges