Henry Giroux Quotes

The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It's really no more inflammatory than that.

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.

How we become moral and understand good and bad, and how we overcome our impulse towards violence, is all really important to me, as a person.

What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

It is a prejudice to think that morality is more favourable to the development of reason than immorality.

I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were right and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions.

As to ethics, unfortunately, we are still at sea. We never did have any popular base for what little ethics we knew, except the religious theories, and now that our faith is shaken in those theories we cannot account for ethics at all. It is no wonder we behave badly, we are literally ignorant of the laws of ethics, which is the simplest of sciences, the most necessary, the most continuously needed. The childish misconduct of our 'revolted youth' is quite equaled by that of older people, and neither young nor old seem to have any understanding of the reasons why conduct is 'good' or 'bad.

The content of scientific theory itself offers no moral foundation for the personal conduct of life.

Ethics is inescapable.

Ignoring moralities is always undesirable, but doing so systematically is reallyworrisome.

Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant!

Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

Most people don't have any association in their minds with what they do and with ethics. They think they somehow moved past the questions of morality or values or ethics, and that's something that I've never imagined to be true.

Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.

It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.

My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

My work is based on the assumption that clarity and consistency in our moral thinking is likely, in the long run, to lead us to hold better views on ethical issues.

There's a great deal of difference between thinking reflectively about moral issues and achieving higher standards of ethical behavior.

That a science, which distinguishes the criterions of right and wrong; which teaches to establish the one, and prevent, punish, or redress the other; which employs in its theory the noblest faculties of the soul, and exerts in its practice the cardinal virtues of the heart; a science, which is universal in its use and extent, accommodated to each individual, yet comprehending the whole community; that a science like this should ever have been deemed unnecessary to be studied in an university, is matter of astonishment and concern.

If you had better sense you’d have learned by now that nothing thrives so well as wickedness