Henry Giroux Quotes

Every year the international finance system kills more people than the Second World War. But at least Hitler was mad, you know.

I think we can see violence in a whole range of realms. We certainly see it in the media, where extreme violence is now so pervasive that people barely blink when they see it, and certainly raise very few questions about what it means pedagogically and politically. Violence is the DNA, the nervous system of this system's body politic.

There are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism.

What happened in Ukraine? The coup d'état in Ukraine has led to a civil war, because, yes, let's say, many Ukrainians no longer trusted President Yanukovych. However, they should have legitimately come to the polls and voted for another head of state instead of staging a coup d'état. And after the coup d'état took place, someone supported it, someone was satisfied with it, while others were not. And those who did not like it were treated from the position of force. And that led to a civil war.

Politics is the womb in which war develops - where its outlines already exist in their hidden rudimentary form, like the characteristics of living creatures in their embryos.

War has become a mode of sovereignty and rule, eroding the distinction between war and peace.

[Negro] should realize that he is living in a war zone, and he is at war with an enemy that is as vicious and criminal and inhuman as any war-making country has ever been.

The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought.

But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi--like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth--do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs to them. "Be not anxious for the morrow," and "which of you being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?" So they dare to be idle, i.e. not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time. They dare to love people even when they are very bad, and they dare not to try and dominate others to show them what they must do for their own good.

The Palestinians are a despotic, undemocratic grouping which promotes a religious war against Israel, a democracy, through terror.

The violence of war admits no distinction; the lance, that is lifted at guilt and power, will sometimes fall on innocence and gentleness.

"Terrorism" is what we call the violence of the weak, and we condemn it; "war" is what we call the violence of the strong, and we glorify it.

Artists never make wars. They are too busy making life out of the matter of their visions.

Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.

Terrorism and war have something in common. They both involve the killing of innocent people to achieve what the killers believe is a good end.

Because war and preparations for war have acquired legitimacy, and because of the tremendous proliferation of arms through production and export, so that they are now available more or less to all and sundry, right down to handguns and stilettos, the cult of violence has by now so permeated relations between people that we are compelled to witness as well an increase in everyday violence.

Politics is more dangerous than war, for in war you are only killed once.

To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

Why are millions spent on the war each day, while not a penny is available for ... artists or the poor? Why do people have to starve when mountians of food are rotting away in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy?

War then, is a relation - not between man and man but between state and state and individuals are enemies only accidentally not as men, nor even as citizens but as soldiers not as members of their country, but as its defenders

The only politician anybody ever believed was Kennedy, anyway. Kennedy, Martin Luther King - civil rights always turns out in bloody war. Where's his dream now? When is a change going to come - as Sam Cooke said - for blacks in America? Anyone who does tell the truth gets a bullet in the head, y'know what I mean?

As many critics have pointed, out, terrorism is not an enemy. It is a tactic. Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today's war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.

This much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

There is no clear or meaningful difference between insurgency and civil war, or between national terrorism and civil war for that matter.

The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.