Henry Giroux Quotes

The New Deal was a socialist revolution.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt eventually became the greatest liberal leader of 20th century United States, but he started as a fiscal conservative. His greatness is founded in his willingness to change his mind to save his country from the Great Depression.

F.D.R. had an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions in 1933 when he drove 15 major bills through the Congress, and super majorities in the House and the Senate in 1935 when he won passage of Social Security.

I ascribe the New Deal as important almost on a par with the French Revolution – not merely an important event in the history of the United States, but the most important event in the history of the United States.

The big policy wins of the New Deal were actually offered as compromises. Because the alternative seemed to be revolution.

For a generation, Republicans have tried to unravel the activist government under which Americans have lived since the 1930s, when Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and invested in infrastructure.

The point about Roosevelt's New Deal was that it was visionary - for the 1930s.

Older Jews think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and see themselves as siding with the working class and the poor, so they continue to vote the way they do.

I look back to the Great Depression, and what Roosevelt was able to do in very difficult times, to get Social Security through back in the time when it was seen as - well, it wasn't what it is today. It was sort of a last-ditch, if you really need it, you got it, but, today, it's much more a part of your retirement program.

My aspirations for this country would be on the scope of what Franklin Roosevelt brought to this country in 1932 when he saw a nation that was broken economically.

Americans are conservative. What they want to conserve is the New Deal.

Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt.

By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.

They do not say Roosevelt saved our system. They say he has given us a new one. That is logical.

The New Deal exists principally on an emotional plane for Obama. To him, the New Deal is something you play like a song, to make you or your constituents feel better.

I am a huge admirer of Franklin Roosevelt's, and I believe social security has done untold good in alleviating the once-widespread issue of poverty among the elderly. FDR believed in the greatness and generosity of Americans - but he was also a cold-blooded politician.

During the New Deal, people thought to be liberal was to reject socialism on one extreme and fascism on the other, and to preserve capitalism through regulation and a social safety net.

What the labor movement did in this country is to make sure that capitalism worked.

Progressivism has time and again added the corrective that has enabled capitalism to survive.

I point out the Democratic party won two world wars and beat the depression, cut out the poverty by two thirds, and was responsible for the same sustained prosperity that we've had in the United States. What the hell do we have to apologize for?

The New Deal saved capitalism - saved it from the big-time capitalists - though many of the big-timers didn't see it that way.

FDR's New Deal and, after it, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower's similar Middle Way, used the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure, like roads and bridges.

The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options, some more optional than others, that offered government as an alternative to the often-flawed private market.

I think we're in a very distinctively different historical moment. I mean, I think that you had two things that were operating in the 1930s that seem to be, in many ways, to have been weakened or disappeared. And of course the beginning of the 21st century, I mean, you have - at one level you had massive social movements.

We didn’t admit it at the time, but practically the Whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.