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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

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Chris Hedges
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: September 18
Author
Journalist
War Correspondent
Writer
St. Johnsbury
Vermont
Christopher Lynn Hedges
Christopher Hedges
Empty
Chests
Glory
Wounded
Profiteering
Honor
Patriotism
Jingoism
Words
Mask
Vanquished
Use
Abstract
Pounding
War
Killing
Senseless
Grief
Cries
Cry
Chest

More quotes by Chris Hedges

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The few surviving Armenians no longer ask to go home. They do not ask for restitution. They ask simply to have the memory of their obliteration acknowledged. It is a moral obsession, the lonely legacy passed onto the third and fourth generation who no longer speak Armenian but who carry within them the seeds of resentment that will not be quashed.
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In war, we always deform ourselves, our essence.
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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.
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If we don't hold fast to our moral principles, nobody's going to. We don't have to have a majority, but once ten, fifteen, twenty million people start voting left, we'll scare the piss out of the Democrats, and they'll have to respond. But they're not going to respond to us until that happens.
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Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.
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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.
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The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.
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Most of these who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war.
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I don't fight fascists because I'll win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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No real journalist makes $5 million a year... Those in power fear and dislike real journalists.
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I don't know who you would blame for this, whether Ricardo or others, but we created a fictitious economic theory to praise a rentier or rent-derived, interest-derived capitalism that countered productive forces within the economy.
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War is addictive. Indeed, it is the most potent narcotic unleashed by mankind.
Chris Hedges
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Economics dominates politics - and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.
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Positive psychology is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis
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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.
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They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn't like the smell of the poor.
Chris Hedges