War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.
Chris HedgesRead
Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the rarity of peace in human history.
Chris Hedges underscores the astonishing fact that out of a span of 3,400 years, humanity has experienced only a fleeting 268 years of peace. This stark statistic serves as a reflection on the nature of human conflict and the challenges we face in striving for a harmonious existence, inviting deeper contemplation on the causes of war and the pursuit of peace throughout history.
In practice
During a conference on global peace initiatives, this quote can be used to illustrate the importance of striving for harmony.
War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.
As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of War our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence.
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.
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.
It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in oneβs own country, than an outcast from oneβs self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.
There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege, it will always be at the expense of truth and justice
We must show that liberty is not merely one particular value but that it is the source and condition of most moral values. What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free. We can therefore not fully appreciate the value of freedom until we know how a society of free men as a whole differs from one in which unfreedom prevails.
If all consciousness is subject to essential laws in a manner similar to that in which spatial reality is subject to mathematical laws, then these essential laws will be of most fertile significance in investigating facts of the conscious life of human and brute animals.
Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.
You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
We're never going to come to a moment where all of us who claim to be feminists can agree about what the first priority of feminism is.
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