Henry Giroux Quotes

This is not Trumpistan.

Our focus needs to be on freeing dissidents and continuing to support the opposition movement within Cuba - not rewarding Castro and subsidizing and strengthening his totalitarian regime.

The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.

Will dissent be permitted? The answer to that question will determine whether the society is a free society or a fear society.

Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy.

Governments that use violence to stop democratic development will not earn themselves respite forever. They will pay an increasingly high price for actions which they can no longer hide from the world with ease, and will find themselves on the wrong side of history.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

The people in Cuba, they know what I stand for, and there's a lot of people in Cuba that stand for the same. But they can't say it.

I knew that if it ever got down to a choice between the Party and our traditional democratic structure I would fight the Party and our traditional democratic structure I would fight the Party to the bitter end.

I love my country but fear my government.

Totalitarianism liquidates its internal enemies or smashes opposition as soon as it arises; it uses methods that are simple and infallible because they are undemocratic. But democracy can defend itself from within only very feebly; its internal enemy has an easy time of it because he exploits the right to disagree that is inherent in democracy.

When a dictatorship controls the political life of a country, responsible opposition cannot develop, and dissent is driven underground and toward the extreme. And to draw attention away from their social and economic failures, dictators place blame on other countries and other races, and stir the hatred that leads to violence. This status quo of despotism and anger cannot be ignored or appeased, kept in a box or bought off.

Tyranny must be opposed at the start. Autocracy, once secured in the saddle, is difficult to dislodge.

Either you were opposed to the growth of Fascism and went out to fight against it, or you acquiesced in its crimes and permitted its growth.

Socio-economic hardship breeds not only repression to force people to live with hardship, but also resistance, often in turn provoking repression in initial rounds, but in subsequent rounds quite possibly forcing dictatorial regimes to give in, partially or thoroughly, and to concede democratic reforms. This is another way, twisted as it may look, in which structural adjustment may indeed lead up to democratization.

In democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not its taste, but its effect,...

The Chinese people don't get to vote but they do get to grumble.

Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.

To us, anyone who opposes dictatorship is our friend. Those who support it, our enemy.

Once you start choking the space for dissent in a democracy, people feel pushed to the wall and then it leads to further dissent and alienation.

India's a very interesting place... there's no formal opposition, but there's genuine on-the-ground opposition.

The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.

Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation ofall men into a few men.