Henry Giroux Quotes

A willingness by politicians to say what they think the public want to hear, and a willingness by large parts of the public to believe what they are told by populist politicians, has led to a deterioration in our public discourse.

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good.

There are a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on keeping lots of conservatives terrified and ill-informed. The groups that exist to raise funds raise more funds when they endorse the crazier candidate.

People are so docile right now. It is almost as if good government means when the politicians lie to us for our own good, for the public good, and bad government is when politicians lie for their own selfish interests.

The Right-wingers everywhere take themselves too seriously, whether in the U.S. or the U.K. And, by the way, so does the Left. The Left can take itself a little too seriously as well.

Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation.

Politics has come to resemble a cynical team game played by politicians, while the public has been pushed aside as if sitting on the seats of a stadium in which passion for politics is gradually making room for blindness and desperation.

Incivility is not the disease. It is the symptom. Partisanship is the disease…. When your highest duty is to your party, the public interest becomes subservient.

The field of politics always presents the same struggle. There are the Right and the Left, and in the middle is the Swamp. The Swamp is made up of know-nothings, of them who are without ideas, of them who are always with the majority.

The polarization of American politics is the proximate cause of the ongoing budget deficit…. Lately, the ideological center in Congress has thinned, and the distance between the parties has widened. Compromise has come to be seen as surrender—and the U. S. Government has all but come to a halt.

In the last several years, I have been troubled by the right shift of the Republican party too far to the right.

The left is really good at selling bad ideas and the right is really bad at selling good ideas.

Let's be clear: the American people didn't give the GOP a stamp of approval or a mandate to ram through an ideologically-driven, far-right agenda.

The Jewish Orthodox community is playing footsie with the alt-right.

Recently in Washington, unfortunately, we have seen examples of the wrong kind of leadership -- when politicians choose scorched earth over common ground, when they operate in what I call the 'evidence-free zone,' with ideology trumping everything else.

This feels like a Steve Bannon whispering in [Donald Trump's] ear.

America, fortunately or unfortunately, is very polarized right now. People fall into their different camps. And people are, are concerned. And they, they want to see change.

I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.

You know, boy, America is a closely divided country.

The most active people in the country know different things, and because each one tends to hear mostly and deal mostly with people with whom they agree, they are reinforced not simply in the conviction that they are right, which is totally appropriate, but that they are the majority. So you have both sides, the Left and the Right, thinking that the majority of the country is really with them.

In America, we're in a divided country.

So for those of you who haven't read any of my five best-selling books: Liberals are driven by Satan and lie constantly.

Right and left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets manipulated by mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.

America is a divided country; we have always been a divided country, but even more divided now, thanks to Trump and a lot of other things, as well.

What I was trying to say in that bit, without saying it out loud, is that there were things - you're right, everything is very politicized these days, literally down to what kind of coffee you drink - that I used to fight with people about. And by the way, not just people like Republicans and Christians, but liberal friends of mine and very radical left-wing types, and alternative, indie types.