Henry Giroux Quotes

War has become a mode of sovereignty and rule, eroding the distinction between war and peace.

Increasingly fed by a moral and political hysteria, warlike values produce and endorse shared fears as the primary register of social relations.

Young people live in a society in which every institution becomes an "inspection regime" - recording, watching, gathering information and storing data.

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

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

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

The media is almost entirely about defining the subject, defining the citizen, as one of three things: a consumer, a threat in this new age of surveillance, or as utterly disposable. Excess.

There is a need for subjects who find intense pleasure in commodification of violence and a culture of cruelty.

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.

Violence now becomes the only tool by which we can actually mediate social problems that should be dealt with in very different ways.

History remains an open horizon that cannot be dismissed through appeals to the end of history or end of ideology.

There is the emergence of a militarized society that now organizes itself for the production of violence. A society in which the range of acceptable opinion inevitably shrinks.

This is a moment in our history - that we can thank neoliberalism for - that has really destroyed what Hannah Arendt called "the virtue of thoughtfulness."

Everywhere we look we see the encroaching shadow of the police state.

Schools resemble the culture of prisons.

Individual struggles merge into larger social movements.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There appears to be no space outside the panoptican of commercial barbarism and casino capitalism.

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.

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.

Symptoms of ethical, political and economic impoverishment are all around us.

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.

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