Chris Hedges Quotes

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.

War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.

War - the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.

War... some people glamorise war and glorify war. It's not nice, from whatever point of view you come from.

There's nothing but brutality and bravery or cowardice that comes out of war. That's pretty much it.

Nothing like war reveals man in the same strength—their courage, their stupidity, their fears, their hopes, their ugliness ….

Young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which ... develops patriotism and courage. But it is only fair, too, to let them know that the garments of the deity are filthy and that some of her influences debase and befoul.

War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.

The disasters of war can be infinitely eerie and poignant.

There's something about being amid the chaos and the horror of a war that makes you appreciate all you don't have - and all you may lose forever.

As a combat veteran, I know the cost of war.

Going to war was the only unselfish thing I have ever done for humanity.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.

In war, people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, and in those circumstances, they act in extraordinary ways. In war, you see people at their very best and their very worst, acting in ways you could never imagine. War is human drama at its most epic and most intense.

The War will leave none of us as it found us.

War is too strange to process alone.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.

War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood.

Every war has its demons.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

in the clash of contending armies and amid the groans of the wounded and the dying, the interests of education are sacrificed – the pacific virtues take their flight from the earth

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. All you have to do is hold your first dying soldier in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that his life is flowing out and you can’t do anything about it. Then you understand the horror of war.

Things don’t go well in war. You make mistakes.

War is about strategic agendas and epic battles that define nations and shape history. War is about courage and heroism, but it is also about pain and suffering and sorrow and tragedy