Henry Giroux Quotations

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Policy is no longer being written by politicians accountable to the American public. Instead, policies concerning the defense budget, deregulation, health care, public transportation, job training programs, and a host of other crucial areas are now largely written by lobbyists who represent mega corporations.

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

Life is now a war zone, and as such, the number of people considered disposable has grown exponentially, and this includes low income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, the unemployed, the homeless, and a range of people who are viewed as a liability to capital and its endless predatory quest for power and profits.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

'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.

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.

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.'

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...

Pedagogy is not about training, it is about critically educating people to be self reflective, capable of critically address their relationship with others and with the larger world. Pedagogy in this sense provides not only important critical and intellectual competencies; it also enables people to intervene critically in the world.

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...

Any dominant ideology operates off the assumption that what it has to say is unaccountable and unquestionable.

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.

Where I grew up, learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that was called cheating. The curriculum sent the clear message to me that learning was a highly individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor. My working class experience...was disparaged.

I mean, we're not talking about simply racism, we're taking about white supremacy.

With the rise of new technologies, media, and other cultural apparatuses as powerful forms of public pedagogy, students need to understand and address how these pedagogical cultural apparatuses work to diffuse learning from any vestige of critical thought. This is a form of public pedagogy that needs to be addressed both for how it deforms and for how it can create important new spaces for emancipatory forms of pedagogy.

Cynicism, disillusionment, and a dispiriting sense of purposeless has cast a shadow over American society seriously draining it of any language or vision that might imagine a different sort of society from the dysfunctional, militarizing, and deeply unequal social order that marked the current historical period.

But we need more than a broader understanding of what is a good society or a moral and political critique of the existing market fundamentalism engulfing American society, we also need to create new forms of solidarity, new and broad based social movements that move beyond the isolated and fractured politics of the current historical moment.

I think that what people have failed to talk about is white supremacy.

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.

All too often the worst thing that can happen to the young is to depoliticize them. When that happens, not only are young people told that they do not count - your agency is worthless, your experiences are worthless, and your voice should remain silent - but they are also told that there is no alternative to current state of affairs.

We no longer have the public spheres available to be able to contest that violence. We don't see it in the mainstream media, we no longer see it in the schools. I mean, this endless criminalization, militarization, of every form of behavior, I mean, strikes me as one of the most dangerous and one of the most ever-growing threats to the United States, of which that speech exemplifies perfectly, and which [Donald] Trump exemplifies with the endless call for law and order.

Cinema is consistently making a claim to particular memories, histories, ways of life, identities, and values that always presuppose some notion of difference, community, and the future. Given that films both reflect and shape public culture, they cannot be defined exclusively through a notion of artistic freedom and autonomy that removes them from any form of critical accountability.

While the universities are increasingly corporatized and militarized, their governing structures are becoming more authoritarian, faculty are being devalued as public intellectuals, students are viewed as clients, academic fields are treated as economic domains for providing credentials, and work place skills, and academic freedom is under assault.

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

I also think that one of the things we often fail to realize is that that kind of violence is now legitimated in multiple public spheres.

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.

When you begin to suggest that dissent, opposition, resistance, the only way to deal with it is not to listen to it and to engage in dialog with it, but basically to label it as anarchy and to repress it with the most violent, in the most violent means possible. I mean, that's essentially an element of neofascism. That's not about democracy.

The degree to which fear now becomes an organizing principle of society is enormous compared to what it was like in the past.

I think the other side of this is in this balance between the social state and the punishing state, remember, the social state has been decimated. And the question becomes, how is finance capital, how does the 1 percent now resort to governing? And they govern basically through a form of lawlessness and what I call the punishing state, in which we've had a punishment creep, and now it moves from the prison to almost every institution in society, from airports to schools to social services.

The rise of globalization, the rise of finance capital, the elimination of the manufacturing base, the decimation of the working class, particularly in terms of those who had some comforts that approximated what the middle class had.

Certainly I think the state is more than willing to not only attempt to change the consciousness of people, but to employ violence in ways that make people quite fearful.

The ideology of neoliberalism, with its privatization, its deregulation, its emphasis on consumption, its elimination of basically apparatuses that can provide alternative points of view, has been so powerful and so normalized.

I mean, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, the Black Lives Movement, it's very difficult to, in a sense, especially since the 1980s, to talk about what the social contract is and what it means, and what it means to celebrate public goods, what it means to make, create social investments.

I think the very idea of the social contract is in disarray.

We're talking about the Communist Party, the Socialist worker's movement, those movements basically have been underlined. We have other movements, but they're not as powerful as the movements that we had then.

FDR was enormously influenced by this, and afraid. I mean, his intervention was to save capitalism. It wasn't to basically appease the workers. And I think that today you don't have those movements.

You had workers' movements. You had left organizations, the Communist Party, that were mobilizing in profoundly powerful ways to basically address the great injustices of capitalism.

I think we're in a very distinctively different historical moment. I mean, I think that you had two things that were operating in the 1930s that seem to be, in many ways, to have been weakened or disappeared. And of course the beginning of the 21st century, I mean, you have - at one level you had massive social movements.

I mean, think of Flint. I mean, think of the lead poisoning of thousands of poor and black children across the United States.

Think of the question of mass incarceration. Think of the coding that the Republican Party has used for years, whether they're talking about Obama or blacks or Willie Horton.

At the same time, you see in those studies, you see the emergence of various movements among black youth that are really challenging the ideology of neoliberalism since the 1980s.

I think in light of the other two registers that you mention, there's also that moment. I mean, to what degree do we begin to take education seriously about the production of a subject in which questions of individual and social agency are linked to democratic possibilities? And so for me, there are three registers there that we need to address.

[Ruling elie] haven't given up on neoliberal ideology, they use it. And I think they've normalized that ideology, the notion that, for instance, that economics should govern all of social life, to such a degree that it becomes increasingly difficult to challenge it.

Neoliberal ideology is enormously powerful.

Ruling elite have think tanks, they have research institutes, they've invaded universities, they've monopolized the cultural apparatuses.

What they [ ruling elite] understand is that matters of desire, subjectivities, identities matter. And they take the cultural apparatuses that they control enormously, enormously, in an enormously important way.

Look, in neoliberalism the ruling elite understand something.

I think that's where we can both seize upon the contradictions and push them to limits that these people would not consider, while at the same time in some way you're taking advantage of what these people are saying within a discourse that has some legitimacy.

Unless you recognize the contradictions within various strata, you fall prey to a really kind of false homogenization that does not do justice to the way in which those contradictions can be both understood and is sometimes actually used to the benefit of people who need them.

[Hillary Clinton] sort of very cautious kind of uncomfortable, clumsy interaction with the black lives movement, who are very smart in recognizing that historical memory matters, that those legacies live on when you don't identify them, when you're not willing to be in dialog with them, when you're not willing to be self-reflective about the very part that you played as part of that apparatus of power.

Even the notion that, you know,[Bill] Clinton was the black president strikes me as the greatest irony of all times.

The real question is, until [Hillary Clinton] faces that legacy and admits that what her husband did was absolutely in the interest of a white supremacist nation, to put it bluntly, I just don't trust her.

I know she [Hillary Clinton] comes out of a legacy with her husband in which the Democratic Party did more, it seems to me, to subjugate blacks to the dynamics of oppression, poverty. The mass incarceration state.

We're talking about race. It's ideology, it's a mode of policy. It's a practice. And it intertwines with class in a very specific way to create something very distinctive that we see now being legitimated in the United States by fascists who absolutely are unapologetic about what they're saying.

When we talk about total war, and we talk about war zones, and we talk about the breakdown of the cities, when you exclude questions of race from that discourse, something disappears that's really central to the forms of repression that we're talking about.

All of this in [Donald] Trump now has become so overt that it's difficult when we talk about repression not to talk about white supremacy, not to talk about its legacy, from slavery to lynching to mass incarceration, and what it has developed into.

The cheerleaders for neoliberalism work hard to normalize dominant institutions and relations of power through a vocabulary and public pedagogy that create market-driven subjects, modes of consciousness, and ways of understanding the world that promote accommodation, quietism and passivity.

The historical legacies of resistance to racism, militarism, privatization and panoptical surveillance have long been forgotten and made invisible in the current assumption that Americans now live in a democratic, post-racial society.

These anti-public intellectuals are part of a disimagination machine that solidifies the power of the rich and the structures of the military-industrial-surveillance-academic complex by presenting the ideologies, institutions and relations of the powerful as commonsense.

I think the other side of this is that while the contradictions matter, one of the things that you cannot lose sight of is that even with a guy like [George] Soros the thing that he doesn't question, which does unify that class, is that they don't want to get rid of the capitalist system, they don't see an alternative.

I think people now live in an age in which the only thing - they don't think about getting ahead. They think about surviving.

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

The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. Not only is this obvious in the presence of a celebrity culture that embraces the banal and idiotic, but also in the prevailing discourses and policies of a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who believe that the legacy of the Enlightenment needs to be reversed.

Politicians such as Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich along with talking heads such as Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck and Anne Coulter are not the problem, they are symptomatic of a much more disturbing assault on critical thought, if not rational thinking itself.

Under a neoliberal regime, the language of authority, power and command is divorced from ethics, social responsibility, critical analysis and social costs.

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.

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.

The demise of higher education as a public good is also evident in light of the election of a number of right-wing politicians who are cutting funds for state universities and doing everything they can to turn them in training centers to fill the needs of corporations. This new and intense attack on both the social state and higher education completely undermines the public nature of what education is all about.

University presidents should be loud and forceful in defending the university as a social good, essential to the democratic culture and economy of a nation. They should be criticizing the prioritizing of funds for military and prison expenditures over funds for higher education. And this argument should be made as a defense of education, as a crucial public good, and it should be taken seriously. But they aren't making these arguments.

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.

If the government were to invest that money in higher education and public services, these would be far better investments. But administrators and academics in the U.S. for the most part don't make these arguments; instead they have retreated from defending the university as a citadel of public values and in doing so have abdicated any sense of social responsibility to the idea of the university as a site of inspired by the search for truth, justice, freedom, and dignity.

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.

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.