Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.
Chris Hedges
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Chris Hedges
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: September 18
Author
Journalist
War Correspondent
Writer
St. Johnsbury
Vermont
Christopher Lynn Hedges
Christopher Hedges
Reality
Played
People
Weakness
Television
Voyeurism
Dark
Nihilism
Moral
Humiliation
Pain
Betrayal
Culture
Celebrity
Shows
Encourage
More quotes by Chris Hedges
Our system doesn't work, and it doesn't work, ultimately, not because of Sarah Palin, or the christian right, or Glenn Beck. It doesn't work because the liberal class failed us. The liberal class failed to find the intellectual and moral fortitude to defend liberal values at a time that they were under egregious assault.
Chris Hedges
War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death.
Chris Hedges
The New York Times is an institution that attracts careerists, who are drawn to power and access. This gave me a kind of a free hand. The kind of work that I wanted to do, most of the other reporters didn't want to do. I was not doing lunch. I was not sucking up to officials. I was writing from the street.
Chris Hedges
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
I don't fight fascists because I'll win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
Chris Hedges
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
Patriotism, often a thinly veiled form of collective self-worship, celebrates our goodness, our ideals, our mercy and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us.
Chris Hedges
I'm not saying we're going to win. I am saying rebellion becomes a way to protect your own dignity. Corporations are, theologically speaking, institutions of death. They commodify everything - the natural world, human beings - that they exploit until exhaustion or collapse. They know no limits.
Chris Hedges
It wasn't a direct route. I began as a freelance reporter. That's an important distinction, because people who rise through the ranks of The New York Times become vetted, conditioned, harassed, and shaped by the institution. That never happened to me.
Chris Hedges
Again, although I'm not a particularly religious person, I go back to the religious left that I come out of: There are moral imperatives to fight back. As Daniel Berrigan says, We're called to do the good. And then we have to let it go. It's not our job to know where the good goes.
Chris Hedges
The belief that rational and quantifiable disciplines such as science can be used to perfect human society is no less absurd than a belief in magic, angels, and divine intervention.
Chris Hedges
We've become the most eavesdropped, monitored, spied on, photographed population in human history, dwarfing anything that was done by the Stasi state and East Germany. And that's all been - you know, these are all the sacrifices that we supposedly have to make to make ourselves safe.
Chris Hedges
It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate state needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role it refuses to permit intellectuals to think or function independently.
Chris Hedges
The imperial projects will continue, Wall Street will be unimpeded in its malfeasance and criminal activity, social programs will continue to be cut, maybe not at the same speed as under a Republican Administration, but it's all headed in the same direction.
Chris Hedges
The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
Chris Hedges
One needs solitude and quiet to think. The cacophony of modern culture is designed to make that impossible.
Chris Hedges
I used to wonder: Is Huxley right or is Orwell right? It turns out they're both right. First you get the new world state and endless diversions as you are disempowered. And then, as we are watching, credit dries up, and the cheap manufactured goods of the consumer society are no longer cheap. Then you get the iron fist of Oceania, of Orwell's 1984.
Chris Hedges
We live in imaginary, virtual worlds created by corporations that profit from our deception.
Chris Hedges
Becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species.
Chris Hedges
The purpose of bread and circuses is, as Neil Postman said in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, to distract, to divert emotional energy towards the absurd and the trivial and the spectacle while you are ruthlessly stripped of power.
Chris Hedges
