Chris Hedges Quotes

A hospital alone shows what war is.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

It makes twenty years or more of peace to make a man. It takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.

A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.

War makes monsters out of men.

This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.

A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes Monsters of Men.

When I went to Afghanistan in 2003, I walked into a war zone. Entire neighborhoods had been demolished. There were an overwhelming number of widows and orphans and people who had been physically and emotionally damaged; every 10-year-old kid on the street knew how to dismantle a Kalashnikov in under a minute. I would flip through math textbooks intended for third grade, fourth grade, and they would include word problems such as, "If you have 100 grenades and 20 mujahideen, how many grenades per mujahideen do you get?" War has infiltrated every facet of life.

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.

War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.

If the first casualty of war is innocence, then perhaps with each bullet fired, bomb detonated, leader overthrown, wall built, economy destroyed and family member killed, we are not creating goodwill and harmony, but rather another child who believes violence is the only means to bring about change in the world.

Oh, go in anywhere Colonel, go in anywhere. You'll find lovely fighting all along the line.

I like war.

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

War is hell. You can't photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear.

Whenever I look at pictures of horrific things that soldiers do or that have been done to soldiers I always feel sorry for everybody involved because politics throws them into these horrific situations where really it's just 18-year-old kids.

War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

Wars break things; they break stories.

War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

Yes, war is hell. It is awful. It involves human beings killing other human beings, sometimes innocent civilians. That is why we despise war.