Henry Giroux Quotes

Every kind of atrocity was inflicted upon their captives. They hung up the noblest and best-looking women naked, cutting off their breasts and stitching them to their mouths, so that the women appeared to be eating them and after this they impaled them on sharp stakes, run up the body.

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

We no longer have the public spheres available to be able to contest that violence. We don't see it in the mainstream media, we no longer see it in the schools. I mean, this endless criminalization, militarization, of every form of behavior, I mean, strikes me as one of the most dangerous and one of the most ever-growing threats to the United States, of which that speech exemplifies perfectly, and which [Donald] Trump exemplifies with the endless call for law and order.

Indiscriminate firing by police on people is absolute barbarism. Instead of solving their problems, the government is trying to suppress the people by force.

Tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake … brand him on the forehead with a hot iron, and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor’s shears.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists.

In rushed a Body of Hellhounds—not content with cutting him and stabbing him in several places, they drew a cord round his neck until his Tongue was forced out—It they cut off and three fingers of his right hand—Then they cut out his wife’s tongue and … with a case knife cut off her thumb and four of her fingers one after another. She I fear cannot recover. There was in the house a brother of hers about 14 years old … his tongue, those merciless Villains cut out and cut the calf of his leg with a sword.

I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun. The horrors of the gibbet and of the crime which brought these wretched murderers to it faded in my mind before the atrocious bearing, looks, and language of the assembled spectators. I came upon the scene at midnight…As the night went on, screeching and laughing, and yelling in strong chorus of parodies on Negro melodies, with substitutions of “Mrs Manning” for “Susannah” and the like were added to these. When the day dawned, thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians, and vagabonds of every kind, flocked on the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour…When the sun rose brightly, it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore. When these two miserable creatures, who attracted all this ghastly sight about them, were turned quivering into the air there was no more emotion, no more pity, no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgement, than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world

When you criminalize something, only criminals can deal with it. When criminals deal with it, there's no recourse to law, so there's only recourse to violence.

I ran away. I kept running away. Almost once a week, I'd run away from those schools. They'd catch me. They'd bring me back to the school, beat me. And it was - it was terrible.

In times of war, as everyone knows, who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable ... in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there.

This little piggy went to Hades This little piggy stayed home This little piggy ate raw and steaming human flesh This little piggy violated virgins And this little piggy clambered over a heap of dead bodies to get to the top

Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and predator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself - a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.

Beat him until there’s no skin left on his back. If he passes out, wake him and beat him again. (Father) Love you, too, Father. (Acheron)

Now you’re thinking like me. A little eye-gouging, some slit nostrils…I could seriously get into that. (Acheron)

The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.

To conceive that compulsion and punishment are the proper means of reformation is the sentiment of a barbarian.

Men and women thought and did noble and mean things that would have been impossible to them before or after. A man cannot drink old Bourbon long and remain in his normal condition. We did not drink Bourbon, but blood.

To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival.

But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that is going to be Human and isn’t yet, or used to be Human once and isn’t now, or ought to be Human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.

War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.

Every war involves a greater or less relapse into barbarism. War, indeed, in its details, is the essence of inhumanity. It dehumanizes. It may save the state, but it destroys the citizen.

Ogbuef Ezedudu,who was the oldest man in the village, was telling two other men when they came to visit him that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan. "It has not always been so," he said. "My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. but after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.

The civilised cultures are the most cruel. It's the same with education - often it breeds sadistic forms of cruelty.