Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Chris Hedges
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: September 18
Author
Journalist
War Correspondent
Writer
St. Johnsbury
Vermont
Christopher Lynn Hedges
Christopher Hedges
World
State
Iron
Dries
Turns
Goods
Huxley
Society
Consumers
Manufactured
Used
Endless
Diversion
States
Credit
Fist
Firsts
Watching
Fists
Oceania
First
Longer
Consumer
Diversions
Right
Wonder
Cheap
Orwell

More quotes by Chris Hedges

Image
We on the left have forgotten that the question is not how do you get good people to rule, most people who rule are mediocre at best and usually venal. The question is how do we make those in power frightened of us and not be seduced by formal political processes.
Chris Hedges
Image
Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers.
Chris Hedges
Image
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
Image
They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn't like the smell of the poor.
Chris Hedges
Image
The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic.
Chris Hedges
Image
Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.
Chris Hedges
Image
Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.
Chris Hedges
Image
Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jail and prisons, however, they can each generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year.
Chris Hedges
Image
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
Image
No real journalist makes $5 million a year... Those in power fear and dislike real journalists.
Chris Hedges
Image
Legitimate rage on the part of working men and women is directed not only towards government but, I think quite correctly, towards liberals, who speak in a very hypocritical language about caring for their interests and yet support institutions that carry out an assault against working men and women.
Chris Hedges
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Chris Hedges
Image
Becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species.
Chris Hedges
Image
Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.
Chris Hedges
Image
War is addictive. Indeed, it is the most potent narcotic unleashed by mankind.
Chris Hedges
Image
One needs solitude and quiet to think. The cacophony of modern culture is designed to make that impossible.
Chris Hedges
Image
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
Image
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