Henry A. Giroux Quotes

“We live in a time that demands a discourse of both critique and possibility, one that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle, and viable social movements, democracy will slip out of our reach and we will arrive at a new stage of history marked by the birth of an authoritarianism that not only disdains all vestiges of democracy but is more than willing to relegate it to a distant memory.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Democratic ideas cannot exist without the public spheres that make them possible.”

“Not surprisingly, the all-powerful evocation of terrorism is reserved only for those acts that threaten the government-sponsored status quo, but not that perpetrated by the state or corporations against the population. So, for example, the ugly history of white people lynching, bombing, and killing Blacks in the United States is not understood, taught, or remembered as a part of the homeland’s history of terrorism.”

“Americans need to continue to develop broad-based movements that reject the established political parties and rethink the social formations necessary to bring about a radical democracy. We see this in the Black Lives Matter movement as well as in a range of other movements that are resisting corporate money in politics, the widespread destruction of the environment, nuclear war and the mass incarceration state.”

“For the ancient Greeks, the ultimate test of the educational system was the moral and political quality of the students that it produced”

“Pedagogy is always about power, because it cannot be separated from how subjectives are formed, desires mobilized, how some experiences are legitimized and others are not, or how some knowledge is considered acceptable while other forms are excluded from the curriculum.”

“When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V-8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine-block in one piece.Ford replied,''Produce it anyway.”