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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 90f6e86 | We once had within our capitalist democracy liberal institutions--the press, labor unions, political third parties, civic and church groups, public broadcasting, well-funded public universities, and a liberal wing of the Democratic Party--that were capable of responding to outside pressure from movements. They did so imperfectly. They provided only enough reforms to save the capitalist system from widespread unrest or, with the breakdown of.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| aa34709 | When facts are treated as if they were opinions, when there is no universal standard by which to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in the reporting of events of the day, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe, where there is no possibility of reaching any conclusion not predetermined by those who interpret the official, divinely inspired text. | dominionism fanaticism religion science truth | Chris Hedges | |
| a90872c | A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wis- dom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. Morality is the product of a civilization, but the elites know little of these traditions. They are products of a moral void. They lack clarity about themselves and their c.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 51c0674 | shutdown your electronic hallucinations. Turn off Facebook, don't put anything in your ears, throw out your TV. I don't Tweet. You have to read! | Chris Hedges | ||
| 5eda73e | Fines, often in the thousands of dollars, are assessed against many prisoners when they are sentenced. There are twenty-two fines that can be imposed in New Jersey, including the Violent Crime Compensation Assessment (VCCA), the Law Enforcement Officers Training & Equipment Fund (LEOT), and Extradition Costs (EXTRA). The state takes a percentage each month out of a prisoner's wages to pay for penalties. It can take decades to pay fines. Som.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 4ae23e6 | Those who manipulate the shadows that dominate our lives are the agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, tel- evision and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photogra- phers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers, and television news personalities who create the vast stage for illusion. They are the puppet masters. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 3f54c10 | We try to see ourselves moving through our life as a camera would see us, mindful of how we hold ourselves, how we dress, what we say. We invent movies that play inside our heads. We imagine ourselves the main characters. We imagine how an audience would react to each event in the movie of our life. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 1211e91 | Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice. | intolerance passivity tolerance | Chris Hedges | |
| 3b80a2b | It is sometimes said that, by virtue of his psychological make-up, man cannot live unless he attaches himself to an object that is greater than himself and outlives him, and this necessity has been attributed to a supposedly common need not to perish entirely. Life, they say, is only tolerable if one can see some purpose in it, if it has a goal and one that is worth pursuing. But the individual in himself is not sufficient as an end for him.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 35884eb | the Christian Right and radical Islamists, although locked in a holy war, increasingly mirror each other. They share the same obsessions. They do not tolerate other forms of belief or disbelief. They are at war with artistic and cultural expression. They seek to silence the media. They call for the subjugation of women. They promote severe sexual repression, and they seek to express themselves through violence. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 7f7da9a | Real life, our own life, is viewed next to the lives of celebrities as inadequate and inauthentic. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 52f7489 | This cult of distraction, as Rojek points out, masks the real disintegration of culture. It conceals the meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It seduces us to engage in imitative consumption. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, economic collapse, and political corruption. The wild pursuit of status and wealth has destroyed our souls and our economy. F.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 70f839e | We have the facade of a functioning capitalist democracy but underneath it is a species of corporate totalitarianism. | Chris Hedges | ||
| be550b7 | A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. | Chris Hedges | ||
| fef2e8b | For years we were called niggers to indicate we had no value or worth and that anything could be done to us,' Ray said. 'Then the word "nigger" became politically incorrect. Sio they began to calling us criminals. When you say a person is a criminal it means that what happens to them does not matter. It means he or she is a nigger. It means they deserve what they get.' - Melvin Ray" | Chris Hedges | ||
| 0fd01a0 | Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 07539c3 | In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 77378b6 | That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new .. | Chris Hedges | ||
| fd7b43b | But grabbing what you can, as John Ruskin said, isn't any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists. | Chris Hedges | ||
| fb968f8 | Identities and morality shift with the wind. Established truths, mores, rules, and authenticity mean nothing. Good and evil mean nothing. The idea of permanent personalities and permanent values, as in the culture at large, has evaporated. It is all about winning. It is all about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism, and fantasies of revenge, while inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 1f147c9 | Celebrity culture has bequeathed to us what Benjamin DeMott calls "junk politics." Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. It personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them. "It's impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America's optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture," DeMott notes. The result of junk politics is that nothing chang.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 37e22fe | Trump is not an anomaly. He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 425c446 | The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition. We are fed words and phrases like war on terror or pro-life or change, and within these narrow parameters, all complex thought, ambiguity, and self-criticism vanish. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 0a49f28 | The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society's zeitgeist. | Chris Hedges | ||
| cbe5b79 | motivation of positive | Chris Hedges | ||
| a68c243 | The idiots take over the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for corporation and the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor. They project economic growth on the basis of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil, and the air, slash jobs and depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created financial.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 368e46f | The seductive inducements to conformity - money, celebrity, prizes, grants, book contracts, hefty lecture fees, important academic and political positions, and a public platform - are scored by those who resist. The rebel does not define success the way the elites define success. Those who resist refuse to kneel down before the idols of mass culture and the power elites. They are not trying to get rich. They do not want to be part of the in.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| cd854de | Resistance is not, fundamentally, political. It is cultural and spiritual. It is about finding meaning and expression in the transcendent and the incongruities of life. Music, poetry, theater and art sustain resistance by giving expression to the nobility of rebellion against the overwhelming forces, what the ancient Greeks called fortuna, which can never ultimately be overcome. Art celebrates the freedom and dignity of those who defy malig.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 8ecae40 | Power is a poison. It does not matter who wields it. The rebel, for this reason, is an eternal heretic. He or she will never fit into any system. The rebel stands with the powerless. There will always be powerless people. There will always be injustice. The rebel will always be an outsider. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 08342ba | Those who resist are relentlessly self-critical. They ask the hard questions that mass culture, which promises an unachievable eternal youth, fame and financial success, deflects us from asking. What does it mean to be born? What does it mean to live? What does it mean to die? How do we live a life of meaning? What is justice? What is truth? What is beauty? What does our past say about our present? How do we defy radical evil? | Chris Hedges | ||
| ccc6605 | We are in the grip of what Kierkegaard called "sickness unto death" - the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement." | Chris Hedges | ||
| c5047c6 | Resistance is not only about battling the forces of darkness. It is about becoming a complete human being. It is about overcoming estrangement. It is about our neighbor. It is about honoring the sacred. It is about dignity. It is about sacrifice. It is about courage. It is about freedom. It is about the capacity to love. Resistance must be become our vocation. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 9ea4c8e | Celebrity culture plunges us into a moral void. No one has any worth beyond his or her appearance, usefulness, or ability to "succeed." The highest achievements in a celebrity culture are wealth, sexual conquest, and fame. It does not matter how these are obtained. These values, as Sigmund Freud understood, are illusory. They are hollow. They leave us chasing vapors. They urge us toward a life of narcissistic self-absorption. They tell us t.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| b34b859 | The morning sleeper Has much undone The quick will catch the prize. | James L. Nelson | ||
| e0d2299 | A man should drink in moderation be sensible or silent. Havamal | James L. Nelson | ||
| 61fd535 | Fin Gall - Gaelic term for Vikings of Norwegian descent. It means White Strangers. | James L. Nelson | ||
| b610950 | It was the duty of any man to face his enemies without hesitation. This was a truth that Odd had been taught from the time he was old enough to learn. And he would never do anything less. But facing one's wife was a different matter. That was something he was very hesitant to do. Nor was he afraid to admit as much, and he doubted that any man would be. | James L. Nelson | ||
| 1e9b3bf | Men and their honor and fighting... Such things were fine for them. They had victory or they had death, and with the latter a hope of heaven. They did not think about the women left behind to be raped, the children to be sold into slavery. Men and their damned, damned honor. | James L. Nelson | ||
| a2fd4d2 | The unwise man is awake all night, and ponders everything over; when morning comes he is weary in mind, and all is a burden as ever. Havamal | James L. Nelson | ||
| eb44a8f | not Santos Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, or Sam Giancana; not H. L. Hunt or Clint Murchison; not James Angleton, Bill Harvey, or David Morales; not Curtis LeMay, Charles Willoughby, or John McCloy; not even J. Edgar Hoover; and certainly not Lee Harvey Oswald--had the motive, the means, the opportunity, the demonstrated pattern of previous criminal, even murderous conduct and the overall demented resolve to see it through. Only one man met .. | Phillip F. Nelson | ||
| dada9c7 | When passing a door-post watch as you walk on, inspect as you enter. It is uncertain where enemies lurk or crouch in a dark corner. Havamal | James L. Nelson | ||
| a8e6342 | Be your friend's true friend, to him and his friends, Thorgrim recalled the old saying. Beware of befriending an enemy's friend. | James L. Nelson | ||
| 4e21b0a | I spent most of this weekend sitting on the sofa reading Proust. The only time my mother left her studio, which she locked behind her, was to go to Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt's house. | Rachel Klein | ||
| 18efde2 | Voor iedereen die zich afvraagt of het mogelijk is de puberteit te overleven, is een bevestigend antwoord de enige geruststelling die ik kan geven. | puberteit | Rachel Klein |