Henry Giroux Quotes

Institutions are imperfect. Governments surely are. People are.

If you don't give education to people, it is easy to manipulate them.

We live in an increasingly sophisticated world that makes it difficult to make simple comments on stuff. There are too many people on both sides of the border who are taking advantage of circumstances and the situation.

What passes for political realism may make for lively academic debates. But it often functions, ironically, as a tool of social control, rendering us passive with an analysis that overwhelms and paralyzes us.

Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves.

Our elite is primarily and increasingly managerial. A managerial elite manages. A crisis, unfortunately, requires thought. Thought is not a management function.

The courts, over time, have always responded to the dominant classes in our society.

People say law but they mean wealth.

There is no social question, there are social questions.

I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense; but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

It is scarcely a mark of intellectual profundity to have noticed that our society is big.

The crowds, the praise, and the power are neither just nor unjust in themselves. As they are typically used in the schools, they represent the values of social order and of individual competitive achievement.

People rise and fall on the basis of the makings of institutions.

Inequality and hierarchy are natural, but that doesn't mean they are right, that doesn't mean there is isn't a productive tension between those forces and the forces of equality.

As our society gets more complex and our people get more complacent, the role of the jester is more vital than ever before. Please stop sitting around. We need you to make a ruckus.

We need to redefine strength in men, not as the power over other people, but as forces for justice.

A people may let a king fall, yet still remain a people, but if a king let his people slip from him, he is no longer a king.

What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume.

Almost all Christians being wretchedly enslaved to blindness and ignorance, which the priests are so far from preventing or removing, that they blacken the darkness, and promote the delusion: wisely foreseeing that the people (like cows, which never give down their milk so well as when they are gently stroked), would part with less if they knew more.

Free people can treat each other justly, but they can't make life fair. To get rid of the unfairness among individuals, you have to exercise power over them. The more fairness you want, the more power you need. Thus, all dreams of fairness become dreams of tyranny in the end.

When you start a political party, you are creating space for yourself. So many people were shocked when they realized that I was serious and had no interest in occupying any political position, so they started to fall out one by one.

I avoid falling into a trap of doing work solely to impress people. I always ask myself, "What don't I ever see?"

... I'm much closer to the people at the bottom than the people at the top, and the latter won't forgive me for it.

If we will measure other people's corn in our own bushel, let us first take it to the Divine standard, and have it sealed.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.