Henry Giroux Quotes

#1. We need to get rid of the growing army of temporary workers now filling the ranks of academy. This is scandalous; it weakens both the power of the faculty and exploits these workers.

Henry Giroux

#2. To see poor people, their benefits being cut, to see pensions of Americans who have worked like my father, all their lives, and taken away, to see the rich just accumulating more and more wealth. I mean, it seems to me that there has to be a point where you have to say, 'No, this has to stop.'

Henry Giroux

#3. The freedom and human capacities of individuals must be developed to their maximum but individual powers must be linked to democracy in the sense that social betterment must be the necessary consequence of individual flourishing.

Henry Giroux

#4. Problems become privatized and removed from larger social issues. This is one task, connecting the personal problems to larger social issues that progressive leftist intellectuals have failed to take on as a major political and educational project.

Henry Giroux

#5. In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue, and thought to have real effects, they must advocate the message that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which they live.

Henry Giroux

#6. War at home is matched by a war on youth. I wrote about this recently. Young people graduate with an average of $23,000 in student loan debt, and they are the ones saddled with it. Youth have become indentured servants and that turns them away from public service.

Henry Giroux

#7. As politics is disconnected from its ethical and material moorings, it becomes easier to punish and imprison young people than to educate them.

Henry Giroux

#8. What is invaluable about Angela Davis' work is that she does not limit her politics to issues removed from broader social considerations, but connects every aspect of her scholarship and public interventions to what the contours of a truly democratic society might look like.

Henry Giroux

#9. America has become amnesiac, a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.

Henry Giroux

#10. A citizen is a political and moral agent who in fact has a shared sense of hope and responsibility to others and not just to him or herself.

Henry Giroux

#11. Undermining life-affirming social solidarities and any viable notion of the public good, right-wing politicians trade in forms of idiocy and superstition that mesmerize the illiterate and render the thoughtful cynical and disengaged.

Henry Giroux

#12. We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

Henry Giroux

#13. All that young people are promised today are the rewards of a shallow materialism and a degree that is defined primarily as a job credential, one that ironically does not even live up to its own claims of guaranteeing either decent employment or a better way of life.

Henry Giroux

#14. Since the 1970s, we have witnessed the forces of market fundamentalism strip education of its public values, critical content, and civic responsibilities as part of its broader goal of creating new subjects wedded to consumerism, risk-free relationships, and the destruction of the social state.

Henry Giroux

#15. Universities should be about more than developing work skills. They must also be about producing civic-minded and critically engaged citizens - citizens who can engage in debate, dialogue and bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance.

Henry Giroux

#16. 'American Sniper' is a film that erases history, spectacularizes violence, and reduces war and its aftermath to cheap entertainment, with an underexplained referent to the mental problems many vets live with when they return home from the war.

Henry Giroux

#17. Universities are some of the few places left where a struggle for the commons, for public life, if not democracy itself, can be made visible through the medium of collective voices and social movements energized by the need for a politics and way of life counter to authoritarian capitalism.

Henry Giroux

#18. Getting ahead cannot be the only motive that motivates people. You have to imagine what a good life is.

Henry Giroux

#19. Angela Davis's legacy as a freedom fighter made her an enemy of the state under the increasingly neoliberal regimes of Nixon, Reagan and J. Edgar Hoover because she understood that the struggle for freedom was not only a struggle for political and individual rights but also for economic rights.

Henry Giroux

#20. You have a situation in which the U.S. is fighting three unjust wars and wasting trillions of dollars in public funds, all the while draining money from important social services and public and higher education.

Henry Giroux

#21. America's addiction to violence is partly evident in the heroes it chooses to glorify.

Henry Giroux

#22. Neoliberalism considers the discourse of equality, justice, and democracy quaint, if not dangerous and must be either trivialized, turned into its Orwellian opposite, or eviscerated from public life.

Henry Giroux

#23. Public schools are not simply being corporatized, they are also subjected increasingly to a militarizing logic that disciplines the bodies of young people, especially low income and poor minorities, and shapes their desires and identities in the service of military values and social relations.

Henry Giroux

#24. With the corporatization and privatization of higher education, it is increasingly more difficult for colleges and universities to expand and deepen democratic public life, produce engaged critical citizens, and operate as democratic public spheres.

Henry Giroux

#25. I am certainly influenced by certain post-structuralist traditions but also a number of other theoretical archives as well - including the brilliant work of Paulo Freire, Zygmunt Bauman, Loic Wacquant, Nancy Fraser, Tony Judt, and others.

Henry Giroux

#26. We need to educate young people to deal with new modes of education that are emerging with the new electronic technologies and we need to educate them to not only learn how to critically read this ubiquitous screen culture but also how to be cultural producers.

Henry Giroux

#27. Many conservatives see higher education as a threat to their reactionary and corporate oriented interests and would like to defund higher education, privatize it, eliminate tenure, and define the working conditions of faculty to something resembling the labor practices of Walmart workers.

Henry Giroux

#28. Democracy as a promise means that society can never be just enough and that the self-reflection and struggles that enable all members of the community to participate in the decisions and institutions that shape their lives must be continually debated, safeguarded, and preserved at all costs.

Henry Giroux

#29. Democracy is not compatible with capitalism but is congruent with a version of democratic socialism in which the wealth, resources, and benefits of a social order are shared in an equitable and just manner.

Henry Giroux

#30. I think that rather than saying that Occupy Wall Street has died, we can say that they're in the process of understanding what the long march through alternative institutions might mean.

Henry Giroux

#31. What has become clear to many Americans is that the electoral system is bankrupt. As the political process becomes more privatized, outsourced, and overrun with money from corporations and billionaires, a wounded republic is on its death bed, gasping for life.

Henry Giroux

#32. It's easier to imagine the death of the planet than it is to imagine the death of capitalism.

Henry Giroux

#33. The mainstream media spins stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible - stories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging its pedagogical influence under the cheap veneer of entertainment.

Henry Giroux

#34. Collective freedom is one devoid of material bondage and one that supports the institutions necessary for democracy.

Henry Giroux

#35. The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world ...

Henry Giroux

#36. As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.

Henry Giroux

#37. Domestic terrorism has opened new war zones, operating off the assumption that all Americans are potential terrorists.

Henry Giroux

#38. The discipline, particularly in these urban schools for the poor, it's not controlled by the administration - they're controlled by the police. This is an expression of a racist logic that has now seeped directly into schools.

Henry Giroux

#39. The biggest lie of all is that capitalism is democracy. We have no way of understanding democracy outside of the market, just as we have no understanding of how to understand freedom outside of market values.

Henry Giroux

#40. We need to figure how to defend higher education as a public good. If we can't do that, we're in trouble.

Henry Giroux

#41. The stories a society tells about itself are a measure of how it values itself, the ideals of democracy, and its future.

Henry Giroux

#42. The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current ...

Henry Giroux

#43. The future doesn't have to mimic the worst parts of the present. There are new ways of sharing information, and as long as they don't give up on the importance of politics, the future is certainly open.

Henry Giroux

#44. We need to take on the new media, and in terms of power and public pedagogy, we need to organize a whole range of people outside of the academy.

Henry Giroux

#45. Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity.

Henry Giroux

#46. The new elites have no allegiances to nation states and don't care about the damage they do to workers, the environment, or the rest of humanity. They are unhinged sociopaths, far removed from what the Occupy Movement called the '99 percent.'

Henry Giroux

#47. Higher educating is defaulting on its obligations to offer young people a quality and broad-based education. This is true in part because the liberal arts and humanities have fallen out of favor in a culture that equates education with training.

Henry Giroux

#48. Power is never so overwhelming that there's no room for resistance.

Henry Giroux

#49. Today, in the age of standardized testing, thinking and acting, reason and judgment have been thrown out the window just as teachers are increasingly being deskilled and forced to act as semi-robotic technicians good for little more than teaching for the test ...

Henry Giroux

#50. We need to educate students to be critical agents, to learn how to take risks, engage in thoughtful dialogue, and taking on the crucial issue what it means to be socially responsible.

Henry Giroux

#51. Not only does neoliberalism undermine both civic education and public values and confuse education with training, it also treats knowledge as a product, promoting a neoliberal logic that views schools as malls, students as consumers, and faculty as entrepreneurs.

Henry Giroux