Henry Giroux Quotes

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Henry Giroux

Profession : Critic

Birth : September 18, 1943

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

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.

Henry Giroux

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

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

Henry Giroux

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

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

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

Henry Giroux

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

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

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.

Henry Giroux

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

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

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

Henry Giroux

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

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

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

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

Henry Giroux

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

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

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