Henry Giroux Quotes

As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America...

A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory.

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.

I don't think the British carry a historical consciousness either.

Whole generations have forgotten history.

It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.

Authority is something from which we are constantly subtracting, of which there remains always a residue, and which we attempt to make smaller and smaller.

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

I think we tend to be kind of ahistorical, and think that life as we are living it in the moment is all we know.

A nation’s attitude toward its own history is like a window into its own soul.

A nation creates itself not just with what it remembers, but with what it forgets.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.

The American war of 1861-65 is recent enough to be embedded still in cultural memory.

History is of all subjects the one which is most engaged with people's perceptions of themselves, identity, politics, all those things which shape the modern world.

I don't know why people like being oppressed.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

Everybody has an image of [princess Margaret], to a certain extent. But I felt it would have been harder if we were playing them as they are now. In a way, I don't know how much of a living memory we as a collective have of them in the '50s, when Margaret was 21 and this sort of Elizabeth Taylor. You don't think of your grandparents as being teenagers. You just can't - your brain just can't go there!

For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.

Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humilation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for-the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.

Every generation tailors history to its taste.

[W]e will do what we like with the bourgeoisie. ... We give the orders; they do what they are told. Any resistance will be broken ruthlessly.

Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.