Chris Hedges Quotes

When I was knowingly misled but only learned that much later, that's really when I started to become disillusioned at the White House.

I never desire to know anything of the detail of political measures, lest even those which I think best should lose anything of their intrinsic value to me, by seeing what low, paltry, personal motives and base machinery and dirty hands have helped to bring them about.

You have deceived our trust, and made us doff our easy robes of peace, to crush our old limbs in ungentle steel.

President Obama chose politics over leadership. 'Hope' and 'Change' have become bait-and-switch.

There is nothing that you could say to me now that I could ever believe.

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

Bull permeates everything.... American people think politics and politicians are full of baloney.

A good man fallen among politicians.

Sitting in marble corridors waiting for important people to lie to you.

Food is as important to armies as ammunition—but more important than either is an unfailing supply of lies. You simply cannot murder your enemy in the most efficient manner if you know he is in every essential the same kind of a man as yourself.

In modern warfare the role of those who institute it is often far removed from the conflict on the ground … I could see welcoming a weapon that eliminated the decision makers while leaving the innocent unharmed.

My generation feels it has been lied to a great deal.

Dreams became issues of East versus West. Hopes became political rhetoric. Progress became a search for power and domination. Somewhere the truth was lost that people don't make war, governments do.

I grew up with the idealistic notion that writing and literature were noble causes. I had no inkling, no sense of what I would eventually encounter in terms of people who weren't being sincere. I'm not saying that it happens always or a lot, but it happens enough that sometimes it makes me feel a little queasy.

All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.

The Chinese general Sun Tzu said that all war was based on deception. Oscar Wilde said the same thing of romance.

How do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists, then believe what they read.

Well, politics is war, and in war, truth is the first casualty.

Betrayals during war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace.

If you want a war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men are ever subject, because doctrines get inside a man's reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines.

No, it was honest," said Harry. "One of the only honest things you've said to me. You don't care whether I live or die, but you do care that I help you convince everyone you're winning the war against Voldemort.

She was tired of being told how it was by this generation, who’d botched things so badly. They’d sold their children a pack of lies: God and country. Love your parents. All is fair. And then they’d sent those boys, her brother, off to fight a great monster of a war that maimed and killed and destroyed whatever was inside them. Still they lied, expecting her to mouth the words and play along. Well, she wouldn’t. She knew now that the world was a long way from fair. She knew the monsters were real.

Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles.

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.