Chris Hedges Quotes About War

Quotes about: War

• We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor people out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power.

  Chris Hedges

  Crush, Lying, War

• The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.

  Chris Hedges

  Country, Fear, Giving Up

  Chris Hedges (2011). “Death of the Liberal Class”, p.21, Nation Books

• Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist. They have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained. The elite...know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don't expect them to save us. They don't know how....and when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being as helpless, and as self-deluded as the rest of us

  Chris Hedges

  Jobs, War, Self

• The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Addiction, Drug

  "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning". Book by Chris Hedges, September 3, 2002.

• In the beginning war looks and feels like love. But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Like Love, Self

  Chris Hedges (2014). “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, p.162, PublicAffairs

• The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.

  Chris Hedges

  Peace, War, Next

  Chris Hedges (2014). “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, p.151, PublicAffairs

• War is addictive. Indeed, it is the most potent narcotic unleashed by mankind.

  Chris Hedges

  Peace, War, Mankind

• War in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics.

  Chris Hedges

  Peace, Betrayal, War

  Chris Hedges (2005). “Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America”, p.96, Simon and Schuster

• In war, we always deform ourselves, our essence.

  Chris Hedges

  Peace, War, Essence

• War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.

  Chris Hedges

  Sports, Military, War

  Chris Hedges (2005). “Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America”, p.97, Simon and Schuster

• The notion that the press was used in the [first Iraq] war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Iraq, Effort

• The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of preemptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. They were had. It is not a new story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill Clinton. It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Party, Fighting

  "The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress". Book by Chris Hedges, 2013.

• Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Giving, Want

  Chris Hedges (2014). “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, p.14, PublicAffairs

• In my second year of Harvard Divinity School, where I was studying to be a minister like my father, I met a guy named Robert Cox, who had been the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald during the Dirty War in Argentina. Bob used to print the names of those who had been disappeared the day before, above the fold in his newspaper. It was a kind of an awakening to me to see what great journalism can and should do.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Father, Dirty

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. July 14, 2011.

• The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Grief, Honor

  "On War". www.nybooks.com. December 16, 2004.

• The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Long, Giving

  Chris Hedges (2014). “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, p.3, PublicAffairs

• The violence of war is random. It does not make sense. And many of those who struggle with loss also struggle with the knowledge that the loss was futile and unnecessary.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Struggle, Loss

  Chris Hedges (2014). “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, p.134, PublicAffairs

• Most of these who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Perception, Impossible

  Chris Hedges (2014). “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, p.21, PublicAffairs

• As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of War our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Thinking, Long

  Chris Hedges (2014). “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, p.180, PublicAffairs

• I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers- historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state- all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Dark, Years

  Chris Hedges (2014). “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, p.3, PublicAffairs

• I think most generations tend to learn the lesson of war the hard way. There is a deep attraction to the empowerment. Freud is right: societies either become locked in a collective embrace of Eros, as individuals do, or a collective embrace of Thanatos, the death instinct. They swing between the two. The notion that societies are naturally prone toward self-preservation is wrong. Self-annihilation can be deeply addictive, intoxicating, enticing. So I take a darker view of human nature, that war is probably always going to be with us. I think history bears me out.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Thinking, Self

  "Addicted to War: A Conversation with Chris Hedges". Interview with Metta Spencer, peacemagazine.org. April-June 2007.

• This too is a jihad. Yet we Americans find ourselves in the dangerous position of going to war not against a state but against a phantom. The jihad we have embarked upon is targeting an elusive and protean enemy. The battle we have begun is never-ending. But it may be too late to wind back the heady rhetoric. We have embarked on a campaign as quixotic as the one mounted to destroy us.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Wind, Enemy

  Chris Hedges (2014). “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, p.4, PublicAffairs

• War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Flags, Killing

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