Top 324 Quotes & Sayings by Henry Giroux - Page 2

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.

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.

War is one of the nation's most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.

A discourse for broad-based political change is crucial for developing a politics that speaks to a future that can provide sustainable jobs, decent health care, quality education and communities of solidarity and support for young people.

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.

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.

There is a need for educators, young people, artists and other cultural workers to develop an educative politics in which people can address the historical, structural and ideological conditions at the core of the violence being waged by the corporate and repressive state and to make clear that government under the dictatorship of market sovereignty and power is no longer responsive to the most basic needs of young people - or most people for that matter.

The prevailing move in American society to a permanent war status does more than promote a set of unifying symbols that embrace a survival of the fittest ethic, promoting conformity over dissent, the strong over the weak, and fear over responsibility, it also gives rise to what David Graeber has called a "language of command" in which violence becomes the most important element of power and mediating force in shaping social relationships.

Power is global and politics is local. That must change. We need a new language for understanding new global power formations as well as new international modes of politics to fight them. Social movements must move outside of national boundaries and join with others across the globe to fight the savagery of neoliberal global politics and central to such a task is the work of intellectuals, artists, cultural workers, and others who can fashion new tools and social movements in the fight against the current anti-democratic threats being imposed all over the globe.

Marginalized youth, workers, artists and others are raising serious questions about the violence of inequality and the social order that legitimates it. They are calling for a redistribution of wealth and power - not within the old system, but in a new one in which democracy becomes more than a slogan or a legitimation for authoritarianism and state violence.

Within neoliberal narratives, youth are mostly defined as a consumer market, a drain on the economy, or stand for trouble.

State violence, particularly the use of torture, abductions, and targeted assassinations are now justified as part of a state of exception in which a political culture of hyper-punitiveness has become normalized. Revealing itself in a blatant display of unbridled arrogance and power, it is unchecked by any sense of either conscience or morality.

Conservative and liberal politicians alike now spend millions waging wars around the globe, funding the largest military state in the world, providing huge tax benefits to the ultrarich and major corporations, and all the while draining public coffers, increasing the scale of human poverty and misery, and eliminating all viable public spheres - whether they be the social state, public schools, public transportation or any other aspect of a formative culture that addresses the needs of the common good.

Everyone is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in bottom-line, cost-effective terms. Freedom is no longer about equality, social justice, or the public welfare, but about the trade in goods, financial capital, and commodities.

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.

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.

Trump is the living embodiment of the main character in the film American Psycho, a symbol of corporate domination on steroids, an out-of- control authoritarian parading and performing unknowingly as a clown, and as a symbol of unchecked narcissism and a bearer of a suffocating culture of fear. He is the symbol of a failed sociality and a declining social order.

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.

Youth no longer inhabit the privileged space, however compromised, that was offered to previous generations. They now occupy a neoliberal notion of temporality of dead time, zones of abandonment and terminal exclusion marked by a loss of faith in progress and a belief in those apocalyptic narratives in which the future appears indeterminate, bleak and insecure.

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.

The alternative position to whether torture is acceptable - that's not an alternative position, that's barbarism. The question here is not whether torture is acceptable or whether it works. It should be simply seen as a war crime. There's no other position on torture.

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

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

Within the United States especially, the often violent response to nonviolent forms of youth protests must be analyzed within the framework of a mammoth military-industrial state and its commitment to war and the militarization of the entire society.

The merging of the military-industrial complex, surveillance state and unbridled corporate power points to the need for strategies that address what is specific about the current warfare and surveillance state and the neoliberal project and how different interests, modes of power, social relations, public pedagogies and economic configurations come together to shape its politics.

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.

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.

The social media not only become new platforms for the invasion of privacy, but further legitimate a culture in which monitoring functions are viewed as benign while the state-sponsored society of hyper-fear increasingly defines everyone as either a snitch or a terrorist.

Schools resemble the culture of prisons.

Young people, under the social contract, suggest a long term investment. What we have today is a government that believes that young people - since they are a long term investment - are a liability. This is system that only believes in short-term investments.

Edward Snowden's real "crime" is that he demonstrated how knowledge can be used to empower people, to get them to think as critically engaged citizens rather than assume that knowledge and education are merely about the learning of skills - a reductive concept that substitutes training for education and reinforces the flight from reason and the goose-stepping reflexes of an authoritarian mindset.

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

As the pleasure principle is unconstrained by a moral compass based on a respect for others, it is increasingly shaped by the need for intense excitement and a never-ending flood of heightened sensations.

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.

Trump provides a more direct and arrogant persona that produces the ugliness of a society ruled entirely by finance capital and savage market values, one that prides itself on the denigration of others as well as of justice, passion, and equality.

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

Everyone is now a potential terrorist.

You can't wait neoliberalism out, because the class war will become more consolidated; the punishing state will increase. They'll increasingly solve problems by putting more people in jail and by criminalizing all kinds of behaviors and by appealing to racist attitudes about immigrants, blacks, minorities. They'll just intensify class warfare, that's all. It'll get to the point where the true nature of the authoritarian state will be obvious.

Increasingly, poor minority and white youth are being funneled directly from schools into prison.

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

Historical memory is a potent weapon in fighting against the desert of organized forgetting and implies a rethinking of the role that artists, intellectuals, educators, youth and other concerned citizens can play in fostering a reawakening of America's battered public memories.

It's much better to talk about the media as a system of propaganda and abuse, of manufactured consent, than it is to claim it's some kind of democratizing force that is not responsible for what it does. The notion that the media simply reflects reality is an argument that justifies its flight from responsibility.

I think we can see violence in a whole range of realms. We certainly see it in the media, where extreme violence is now so pervasive that people barely blink when they see it, and certainly raise very few questions about what it means pedagogically and politically. Violence is the DNA, the nervous system of this system's body politic.

The media is not about responding to the wishes of people. All you have to do in the United States is turn on the national news at six-thirty, and watch big pharma intervene between the news stories, trying to tell people what drugs they should buy. That's not a reflection of anything. That's an attempt to promote a particular kind of consumer logic that basically abuses people.

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.

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.

The pedagogy of authoritarianism is alive and well in the United States, and its repression of public memory takes place not only through the screen culture and institutional apparatuses of conformity, but is also reproduced through a culture of fear and a carceral state that imprisons more people than any other country in the world.

Today, there is a new focus on public values, the need for broad-based movements for solidarity, and alternative conceptions of politics, democracy and justice.

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

If the ongoing struggles waged by young people are to matter, demonstrations and protests must give way to more sustainable organizations that develop alternative communities, autonomous forms of worker control, collective forms of health care, models of direct democracy and emancipatory modes of education.

Capitalism, in my estimation, is not about democracy. I think we're beginning to see an understanding of this. We see it in the Black Lives Matter movement. We see it among black youth who are now struggling and trying to make connections internationally with other groups and trying to figure out what's going on in the world and the ways things like police violence and systemic violence all come together under neoliberalism.

Young people refuse the notion that financialization defines the only acceptable definition of exchange, one that is based exclusively on the reductionist notion of buying and selling.

Trump, like that canary in the coalmine, makes clear what elements of fascism are really like. Let's be honest. The racism, the ignorance, the stupidity, the baiting, the great-man affect, this notion that he exists in a circle of certainty that can't be doubted, this kind of perverse hatred of the other. We've seen this before. This legacy is not new. What we have to recognize is the different form that it takes at a different moment in history.

Confronting the intolerable should be challenging and upsetting. Who could read the testimonies of Primo Levi and not feel intellectually and emotionally exhausted? Or Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, not to mention those of Malcolm X? It is the conditions that produce violence that should upset us ethically and prompt us to act responsibly, rather than to capitulate to a privatized emotional response that substitutes a therapeutic language for a political and worldly one.

The issue should not be, we're going to tax you more to give you the services you want. The issue is, this is the wealthiest country in the world, and we're going to use that wealth to service human needs and not to service a military industrial corporate surveillance state.

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

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

The pessimism of the intellect is the starting point for struggle. It's not the end point, it's the starting point. You have to make something critical to make it meaningful, to make it transformative.

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.

Progressive visions pale and are smashed next to the normalization of market-driven government policies that wipe out pensions, eliminate quality health care, punish unions, demonize public servants, raise college tuition, and produce a harsh world of joblessness - all the while giving billions and huge bonuses, instead of prison sentences... to those bankers and investment brokers who were responsible for the 2008 meltdown of the economy and the loss of homes for millions of Americans.