Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt Quotes

“Chant back to us our platitudes about democracy, greatness, and freedom. Vote in our rigged corporate elections. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide huge profits for corporations.”
― Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”
― Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

“The fact that alienated people can be counted on to vent their spleen in ineffectual directions—by fighting among themselves—relieves the government of the need to deal fundamentally with the conditions which cause their frustrations,”
― Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

“Our march toward self-annihilation has already obliterated ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans and wiped out half of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet.25 At this rate, by 2030, only ten percent of the Earth’s tropical forests will remain.”
― Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

“it has enriched a tiny global elite that has no loyalty to the nation-state. These corporations, if we use the language of patriotism, are traitors.”
― Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

“When you’re violent you undermine everything.”
― Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

“We do have a grand strategy,” says Zeese, who was the spokesman for Ralph Nader’s 2004 presidential campaign. “Nonviolent movements shift power by attacking the columns that hold the power structure in place. Those columns are the military, police, media, business, workers, youth, faith groups, NGOs, and civil servants. Every time we deal with the police, we have that in mind. The goal is not to hit them, hit them, hit them, and weaken them. The goal is to pull people from those columns to our side. We want the police to know that we understand they’re not the 1 percent. The goal is not to get every police officer, but to get enough police so that you have a division.”
― Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

“A culture,” the poet W. H. Auden observed, “is no better than its woods.”
― Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

“The sweats teach you that you can’t carry grudges, you can’t carry hatred in your heart. It’ll make you sick, so you have to learn to forgive,”
― Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

“We extract one hundred tons of coal from the earth every two seconds in the United States, and about seventy percent of that coal comes from strip mines and mountaintop removal, which began in 1970.”
― Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

“the sack of kittens sinking in the icy creek increases the cold”
― Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt