Chris Hedges Quotes

Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.

Nursed and educated in the daily habit of seeing the degraded condition, both bodily and mental, of these unfortunate beings [slaves], few minds have yet doubted that they were as legitimate subjects of property as their horses or cattle

The idea that you have to rent yourself to somebody and follow their orders, and that they own and you work there, and you built it but you don't own it, that's a highly unnatural notion. You don't have to study any complicated theories to see that this is an attack on human dignity.

Marx and Engels never talked about murdering the bourgeois. According to the old bourgeois concept, the judges were the ones who judged, and the executioners were the ones who executed.

Capitalism in and of itself is based on the monetising of human labour, and the first evidence of that is slavery. And that has never changed. We are all participating in that.

Classical theology defines sin as 'rebellion against God.' The answer is not incorrect as much as it is shallow and insulting to the human being. Every person deserves to be treated with dignity even if he or she is a 'rebellious sinner'.

In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force

I'm not against trade...but they're not really trade deals. They're really investment deals between international corporations...They're saying we want to get a race to the bottom so we can exploit the most unfortunate worker.

These are the elements of an emerging order that may prove to be as dangerous as any fundamentalism that history has produced. For in a world where anything or anyone can be owned, manipulated, and exploited for profit, everything and everyone will be.

We live in an age when you can prowl the streets of major cities and find human beings offering themselves in store windows, or just reach for the yellow pages and have them delivered. It is the same mindset at work, spreading in our world, and after a while this attitude can find nothing very special about anything or anybody, let alone whales.

The danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit.

The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

...That it's making a dare to the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?" ~pg 423

The world of the commodity is a world upside-down, which bases itself not upon life but upon the transformation of life into work.

Capitalism arose and took off its pajamas. Another day, another dollar. Each man is valued at what he will bring in the marketplace. Meaning has been drained from work and assigned instead to remuneration.

Why are vegans made fun of while the inhumane factory farming process regards animals and the natural world merely as commodities to be exploited for profit?

The whole world is simply nothing more than a flow chart for capital.

We come crawling through these cracks, orphans, lobotomies; if you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything. Whole rotten world come down and break. Let me spread my legs.

Discovery is always rape of the natural world. Always.

The corporation, like the psychopathic personality it resembles, is programmed to exploit others for profit.

There's still nearly the same amount of slavery, if not more, in the world today, as there was at the height of the slave trade.

Capitalism’s concept of competitive man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to market relationships, to exploitation and external authority, is anti-human and intolerable in the deepest sense

You are always in the world. Even in Vagabond. I am not on the road, I am not eating nothing. But in a way we all have a Mona. We all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road. In all women there is something in revolt that is not expressed.

Cool is spent. Cool is empty. Cool is ex post facto. When advertisers and pundits hoard a word, you know it's time to retire from it. To move on. I want to suggest, therefore, that we begin to avoid cool now. Cool is a trick to get you to buy garments made by sweatshop laborers in Third World countries. Cool is the Triumph of the Will. Cool enables you to step over bodies. Cool enables you to look the other way. Cool makes you functional, eager for routine distraction, passive, doped, stupid.

Win or lose, we achieve nothing in the world that we understand [...]' 'But then the world does not matter.' 'Indeed it does not [...] It is good to understand that.