Chris Hedges Quotes

Dachau has been my own lifelong point of no return. Between the moment when I walked through the gate of that prison, with its infamous motto, 'Arbeit Macht Frei,' and when I walked out at the end of a day that had no ordinary scale of hours, I was changed, and how I looked at the human condition, the world we live in, changed ... Years of war had taught me a great deal, but war was nothing like Dachau. Compared to Dachau, war was clean.

I'm someone who lived in a war for five years. I received bombs on my head every day of my childhood. Did that stop me from living? Did that stop me from laughing?

I don't write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.

The Iraq I returned from was, in my mind, a fairly simple place. By which I mean it had little relationship to reality. It's only with time and the help of smart, empathetic friends willing to pull through many serious conversations that I've been able to learn more about what I witnessed.

'Each One Lost' I wrote the day after I got home. My week in Afghanistan was a very short trip, but it was a powerful experience.

Alright, let's tackle the worst part of this pandemic: people are dying, or they're worried about their loved ones dying - and it's hard not to spiral out. After almost two decades at war, this has been the reality for military families for a very long time. Welcome to our club.

Losing a game is not a tragedy after experiencing border raids and having to eat beetles because you are out of rations.

War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.

Washington is awash in post-war testosterone.

When people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over, and you're strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can't handle it.

I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went o r you didn't, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.

It's true, we tend to write about the same thing over and over again because this is our trauma. If I had been in World War II, I might have been writing about D-Day over and over again.

There's something in the Zeitgeist now. A lot of [film] scripts I get have these very dark themes, a cornucopia of dysfunction. You know, Jane is a 13-year-old anorexic who lives with her parents and has been raped by her father. And this is a comedy.

Before the war it had seemed incredible that such terrors and slaughters, even if they began, could last more than a few months. After the first two years it was difficult to believe that they would ever end.

The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.

War: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.

I find period pieces really difficult to get my head around. How can we know what it must have been like to be in Nazi Germany in 1944? The reality weighs on me because I feel like you want to try and honor what happened, but how can you truly know? I have never lived in a war or lost anyone.

Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.

I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.

Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don't get that experience, but suddenly in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror - but, by God, you are alive.

War affected my family a lot, and I was quite curious about it. I first went off to war in the early 90's as a journalist, partly out of curiosity and partly because I needed a career. War reporting has been very glamorous and exciting, and everything else that young men like.

The life changing moment for me what the first time I went to a war zone and that was Sierra Leone. I took two weeks, eleven years ago and I went. I wasn't an Ambassador or anything I just asked to go and I was allowed to go. It was like someone smacked me in the face.

One has personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

I've been to war. I've raised twins. If I had a choice, I'd rather go to war.