Quote

The pessimism of the intellect is the starting point for struggle. It's not the end point, it's the starting point. You have to make something critical to make it meaningful, to make it transformative.

Henry Giroux

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Henry Giroux
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 18
Journalist
Teacher
Providence
Rhode Island
Struggle
Point
Something
Transformative
Make
Pessimism
Meaningful
Intellect
Critical
Starting

More quotes by Henry Giroux

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Youth are no longer the place where society reveals its dreams.
Henry Giroux
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Young black men in America have an identity ascribed to them that is a direct legacy of slavery.
Henry Giroux
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Collective freedom is one devoid of material bondage and one that supports the institutions necessary for democracy.
Henry Giroux
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Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.
Henry Giroux
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The market-driven spectacle of war demands a culture of conformity, quiet intellectuals and a largely passive republic of consumers.
Henry Giroux
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Rich people live in places so removed from everybody else, they operate in circles so incestuous and so closed, they're off on islands. To try to understand their indifference is to understand also their separation from the rest of society.
Henry Giroux
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I think that contradictions, unless they're understood, unless they're analyzed, unless they're thoughtfully probed, unless people have a sense of what those contradictions mean - there's just as much of a chance that they'll move into embracing fascism as there is that they'll move into a more radical conception of democracy itself.
Henry Giroux
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As modern society is formed against the backdrop of a permanent war zone, a carceral state and hyper-militarism, the social stature of the military and soldiers has risen.
Henry Giroux
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Any dominant ideology operates off the assumption that what it has to say is unaccountable and unquestionable.
Henry Giroux
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Very little appears to escape the infantilizing and moral vacuity of the market.
Henry Giroux
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Problems become privatized and removed from larger social issues. This is one task, connecting the personal problems to larger social issues that progressive leftist intellectuals have failed to take on as a major political and educational project.
Henry Giroux
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Certainly I think the state is more than willing to not only attempt to change the consciousness of people, but to employ violence in ways that make people quite fearful.
Henry Giroux
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Symptoms of ethical, political and economic impoverishment are all around us.
Henry Giroux
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As the pleasure principle is unconstrained by a moral compass based on a respect for others, it is increasingly shaped by the need for intense excitement and a never-ending flood of heightened sensations.
Henry Giroux
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Where I grew up, learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that was called cheating. The curriculum sent the clear message to me that learning was a highly individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor. My working class experience...was disparaged.
Henry Giroux
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I think we're in a very distinctively different historical moment. I mean, I think that you had two things that were operating in the 1930s that seem to be, in many ways, to have been weakened or disappeared. And of course the beginning of the 21st century, I mean, you have - at one level you had massive social movements.
Henry Giroux
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All of this in [Donald] Trump now has become so overt that it's difficult when we talk about repression not to talk about white supremacy, not to talk about its legacy, from slavery to lynching to mass incarceration, and what it has developed into.
Henry Giroux
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I mean, we're not talking about simply racism, we're taking about white supremacy.
Henry Giroux
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Education must become central to any viable notion of politics willing to imagine a life and future outside of casino capitalism.
Henry Giroux
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We need to get rid of the growing army of temporary workers now filling the ranks of academy. This is scandalous it weakens both the power of the faculty and exploits these workers.
Henry Giroux