CHRIS HEDGES

Rape, mutilation, abuse, and theft are the natural outcome of a world in which force rules, in which human beings are objects.

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

Any open society that tolerates intolerance, sees tolerance disappear and the tolerant along with it.

Remember that everybody signed up as fast as they could in World War I because they thought the war would be over by Christmas.

Very thinly-veiled self glorification.

War always begins with the dehumanizing of the enemy through rhetoric

The poisoning of the civil discourse always accompanies totalitarian movements.

Fascist movements adopt local symbols and words. They turn these, often, to meanings that are the exact opposite from their origin.

Nobody hates a war more than soldiers who have been through it.

War is the most powerful narcotic ever invented by humankind. The more you seek it out the more powerful it becomes.

There is no way for people to vote against Goldman Sachs.

There are poor people of color in this country whose bodies, locked in cages, enrich the prison-industrial complex.

The use of billions of dollars to fund election campaign and pay lobbyists to author legislation is not politics. It is legalized bribery.

Revolutions, when they erupt, appear to the elites and the establishment to be sudden and unexpected. This is because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is unseen by the mainstream society, noticed only after it has largely been completed.

Many military service chaplains are behaving more like commissars. They are making people loyal to an ideology rather than to a democratic state.

War is a drug…. Maybe the supreme drug of human existence…. It creates a landscape that is almost beyond human imagination…. You have that adrenalin rush….

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

I will step outside the system. Voting for the “lesser evil”-or failing to vote at all-is part of the corporate agenda to crush what is left of our anemic democracy. And those who continue to participate in the vaudeville of a two-party process, who refuse to confront in every way possible the structures of corporate power, assure our mutual destruction.

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.

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.

The bleakness of what faces us is difficult to swallow. As long as we engage in happy platitudes and a false kind of vision of the possible, it may empower you over the short term, but it is eventually, because of the reality in front of us, going to lead to despair and cynicism and apathy. It's better to swallow hard the bitter pill of what we're up against.

When you have a liberal class that no longer functions, when those people who traditionally defend and care about a civil society no longer do so, then you cede power to very frightening, deformed figures, all of which we are watching leap up around the fringes of our political establishment - this lunatic fringe, which has largely taken over the Republican Party.

They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn't like the smell of the poor.

I don't fight fascists because I'll win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.

I don't know who you would blame for this, whether Ricardo or others, but we created a fictitious economic theory to praise a rentier or rent-derived, interest-derived capitalism that countered productive forces within the economy.