Henry Giroux Quotes About Democracy

Quotes about: Democracy

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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

Democracy, Individual Power, Social
They're rights that should be endemic to any democracy. The right to a free quality education, from elementary school right through higher education. The right to have a decent social wage. The right to a decent job. Political rights; the right to vote. These are all parts of the social contract, from the New Deal onwards, that never went far enough.

Henry Giroux

School, Political, Democracy
I am not against identity politics or single based issues; at the same time, we need to find ways to connect these singular modes of politics to broader political narratives about democracy so we can recognize their strengths and limitations in building broad-based social movements. In short, we need to find new ways to connect education to the struggle for democracy that is under assault in ways that were unimaginable forty years ago.

Henry Giroux

Struggle, Issues, Identity Politics

"Higher Education Under Attack: An Interview With Henry A. Giroux". Interview with C Cryn Johannsen, www.truth-out.org. April 22, 2011.
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.

Henry Giroux

Mean, Democracy, Labels

Source: www.truth-out.org
State violence operating under the guise of personal safety and security, while parading as a bulwark of democracy, actually does the opposite and cancels out democracy as the incommensurable sharing of existence that makes the political possible.

Henry Giroux

Opposites, Safety, Political

Source: www.truth-out.org
Margaret Thatcher in Britain and soon after Ronald Reagan in the United States - both hard-line advocates of market fundamentalism - announced that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem not the solution. Democracy and the political process were all but sacrificed to the power of corporations and the emerging financial service industries, just as hope was appropriated as an advertisement for a whitewashed world in which the capacity of culture to critique oppressive social practices was greatly diminished.

Henry Giroux

Government, Practice, Political

Source: www.truth-out.org
What must be addressed in the most immediate sense is the threat that the emerging police state in the United States poses not to just the young protesters occupying a number of American cities, but also the threat it poses to democracy itself. This threat is being exacerbated as a result of the merging of a war-like mentality and neoliberal mode of discipline and education in which it becomes difficult to reclaim the language of obligation, social responsibility and civic engagement.

Henry Giroux

War, Responsibility, Cities

Source: www.truth-out.org
There is no genuine democracy without an informed public. While there are no guarantees that a critical education will prompt individuals to contest various forms of oppression and violence, it is clear that in the absence of a formative democratic culture, critical thinking will increasingly be trumped by anti-intellectualism, and walls and war will become the only means to resolve global challenges.

Henry Giroux

Wall, War, Mean

Source: www.counterpunch.org
Education as a democratic project always presupposes a vision of the future in its introduction to, preparation for, and legitimation of particular forms of social life. It is utopian in its goal of expanding and deepening the ideological and material conditions that make a democracy possible. As a moral and political practice, education produces the modes of literacy, critique, sense of social responsibility, and civic courage necessary to imbue young people with the knowledge and skills needed to enable them to be engaged critical citizens willing to fight for a sustainable and just society.

Henry Giroux

Responsibility, Fighting, People

Source: www.truth-out.org
How young people are represented betrays a great deal about what is increasingly new about the economic, social, cultural and political constitution of American society and its growing disinvestment in young people, the social state and democracy itself.

Henry Giroux

People, Political, Democracy

Source: www.truth-out.org
The war on terror, rebranded under Obama as the "Overseas Contingency Operation," has morphed into war on democracy.

Henry Giroux

War, Democracy, Operations

Source: www.truth-out.org
The current siege on higher education, whether through defunding education, eliminating tenure, tying research to military needs, or imposing business models of efficiency and accountability, poses a dire threat not only to faculty and students who carry the mantle of university self-governance, but also to democracy itself.

Henry Giroux

Military, Accountability, Democracy

Source: www.counterpunch.org
Neoliberalism is going to fail by being replaced. The system is entirely broken. Whenever you have a system that equates a market economy with a market society and claims that capitalism is democracy, you've not only got a massive lie being imposed on the people, but you've got the foundation for a form of authoritarianism and a much more intensive form of class warfare.

Henry Giroux

Lying, People, Broken
The structures of neoliberal violence have put the vocabulary of democracy on life support, and one consequence is that subjectivity and education are no longer the lifelines of critical forms of individual and social agency.

Henry Giroux

Vocabulary, Agency, Support

Source: www.truth-out.org
America is at war with itself because it's basically declared war not only on any sense of democratic idealism, but it's declared war on all the institutions that make democracy possible. And we see it with the war on public schools. We see it with the war on education. We see it with the war on the healthcare system.

Henry Giroux

War, School, Democracy

Source: www.truth-out.org
Collective freedom is one devoid of material bondage and one that supports the institutions necessary for democracy.

Henry Giroux

Support, Democracy, Bondage

"Angela Davis, Education and the Meaning of Freedom" by Henry A. Giroux, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 10, 2013.
Within the existing neoliberal historical conjuncture, there is a merging of violence and governance and the systemic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy.

Henry Giroux

Historical, Democracy, Violence

Source: www.truth-out.org
The real nightmare resides in a society that hides behind the mutually informing and poisonous notions of colorblindness and a post-racial society, a convenient rhetorical obfuscation that allows white Americans to ignore the institutional and individual racist ideologies, practices and policies that cripple any viable notion of justice and democracy.

Henry Giroux

Real, Practice, White

Source: www.truth-out.org
Any society's insistence on how it takes democracy seriously can, in fact, be measured by the way it treats its children. And if we take that index as a measure of the United States, it's utterly failing. You have young people basically who - in schools that are increasingly modeled after prisons. You have their behavior being increasingly criminalized. And one of the most atrocious of all acts, you have the rise of debtors' prisons for children.

Henry Giroux

Children, School, People

Source: www.truth-out.org
Occupy did something fabulous. What Occupy made clear was that there is an inequality at the heart of American democracy that undermines it, if not ruins it. That served a purpose. It suggested that we need a new language and we need a new way of understanding exactly how politics leaves people out, particularly young people.

Henry Giroux

Heart, People, Understanding
That generation really has to fight for a new political language, social movements, and alliances with students from other countries. They have to convince labor, parents, and the general public that the fight over higher education is a fight that benefits everyone in a sustainable democracy and not just faculty and students.

Henry Giroux

Country, Fighting, Political Language

"Higher Education Under Attack". Interview with C. Cryn Johannsen, www.truth-out.org. April 22, 2011.
As young people make diverse claims on the promise of a radical democracy, articulating what a fair and just world might be, they are increasingly met with forms of physical, ideological and structural violence.

Henry Giroux

People, Promise, Democracy

Source: www.truth-out.org
Widespread violence now functions as part of an anti-immune system that turns the economy of genuine pleasure into a mode of sadism that creates the foundation for sapping democracy of any political substance and moral vitality. The predominance of the disimagination machine in American society, along with its machinery of social death and historical amnesia, seeps into in all aspects of life, suggesting that young people and others marginalized by class, race and ethnicity have been abandoned.

Henry Giroux

Race, Ethnicity, Class

Source: www.truth-out.org
The Obama administration doesn't see schools as a public good. It doesn't see schools as places where basically we can educate students in a way to take democracy seriously and to be able to fight for it. It sees them as basically kids who should be part of the global workforce.

Henry Giroux

School, Kids, Fighting

Source: www.truth-out.org
You don't have any vestige of democracy in this country. A report recently came out of Princeton University claiming that, of all the policies that have been made in the last thirty years, 95% of them were in the interest of the rich and had nothing to do with what people wanted - basic services, roads, all of that. They called it an oligarchy.

Henry Giroux

Country, People, Democracy

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Born: September 18, 1943
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