Howard Zinn Quotes

#1. Even if you assume presidents were democratically elected they still have no right to keep secrets from the American people.

Howard Zinn

#2. It was borrowed time anyway - the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of a grand duc and the casualness of chorus girls.

Howard Zinn

#3. They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.

Howard Zinn

#4. Should we not begin to redefine patriotism? We need to expand it beyond that narrow nationalism which has caused so much death and suffering. If national boundaries should not be obstacles to trade-we call it globalization-should they also not be obstacles to compassion and generosity?

Howard Zinn

#5. Poverty and Discontent appear in every Face (except the Countenances of the Rich) and dwell upon every Tongue." He spoke of a few men, fed by "Lust of Power, Lust of Fame, Lust of Money," who got rich during the war.

Howard Zinn

#6. The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.

Howard Zinn

#7. No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class.

Howard Zinn

#8. The only way things will happen is if people get over the notion that they must see immediate success. If they get over that notion and persist, then they will see things happen before they even realize it.

Howard Zinn

#9. And still, even from the cells of the condemned, the message was going out: the class war was still on in that supposedly classless society, the United States.

Howard Zinn

#10. I have come to believe that our lives can be turned in a different direction, our minds adopt a different way of thinking, by some significant, though small event. That belief can be frightening, or exhilarating, depending on whether you just contemplate it or do something with it.

Howard Zinn

#11. History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.

Howard Zinn

#12. What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but "who is sitting in"
and who is marching outside the White House, pushing for change.

Howard Zinn

#13. Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.

Howard Zinn

#14. There is an extent of riches, as well as an extreme of poverty, which, by harrowing the circles of a man's acquaintance, lessens his opportunities of general knowledge.

Howard Zinn

#15. In war, good guys always become bad guys.

Howard Zinn

#16. Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a 'war on terrorism' is a contradiction in terms.

Howard Zinn

#17. Missing from such histories are the countless small actions of unknown people that led up to those great moments. When we understand this, we can see that the tiniest acts of protest in which we engage may become the invisible roots of social change.

Howard Zinn

#18. George Orwell said, "Whoever controls the past controls the future," by which he meant that history is incredibly important in shaping the world view of the next generation of people.

Howard Zinn

#19. One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.

Howard Zinn

#20. Sometimes it's a short step from banning to burning.

Howard Zinn

#21. The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.

Howard Zinn

#22. The cry of the poor is is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.

Howard Zinn

#23. The term 'just war' is an internal contradiction. War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is how to deal with evil, tyranny and oppression without killing huge numbers of people.

Howard Zinn

#24. People who have no respect for human life or for freedom or justice have taken over this beautiful country of ours. It will be up to the American people to take it back.

Howard Zinn

#25. Capital punishment could not be justified in any society calling itself civilized.

Howard Zinn

#26. And Bernice Johnson, who organized the Albany Freedom Singers and was expelled from Albany State College for her determined involvement in the movement.

Howard Zinn

#27. The future is an infinite succession of presents

Howard Zinn

#28. If you permit unprincipled and ambitious men to monopolize the soil, they will become masters of the country in the certain order of cause and effect ...

Howard Zinn

#29. Ten thousand people wrote letters to the governor of Utah, protesting the verdict, but Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad. Before he died he wrote to Bill Haywood, another IWW leader, "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize." Socialism,

Howard Zinn

#30. The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (as either side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time.

Howard Zinn

#31. Party politics and religion now substituting for class conflict.

Howard Zinn

#32. Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.

Howard Zinn

#33. I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.

Howard Zinn

#34. I could only think one troubling thought: the police, the state, did the bidding of the holders of great wealth. How much freedom of speech and freedom of assembly you had depended on what class you were in.

Howard Zinn

#35. Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.

Howard Zinn

#36. Education can, and should be, dangerous.

Howard Zinn

#37. If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.

Howard Zinn

#38. The Roman Empire came to an end, but the Roman people didn't come to an end, so I see the American Empire coming to an end just as other empires have come to an end.

Howard Zinn

#39. The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.

Howard Zinn

#40. During elections for the 1776 convention to frame a constitution for Pennsylvania, a Privates Committee urged voters to oppose great and overgrown rich men ... they will be too apt to be framing distinctions in society.

Howard Zinn

#41. There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

Howard Zinn

#42. Living in Atlanta those seven tumultuous years, I learned not to trust the Northern stereotype of white Southerners as incorrigible racists. Yankee self-righteousness ignored the depth of race hatred in places like Boston or New York.

Howard Zinn

#43. We must recognize that we cannot depend on the governments of the world to abolish war because they and the economic interests they represent benefit from war.

Howard Zinn

#44. Were the Founding Fathers wise and just men trying to achieve a good balance? In fact, they did not want a balance, except one which kept things as they were, a balance among the dominant forces at that time.

Howard Zinn

#45. will not hold ourselves bound to obey the laws in which we have no voice of representation.

Howard Zinn

#46. The really critical thing isn't who's sitting in he White House, but who is sitting in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating ? - those are the things that determine what happens ...

Howard Zinn

#47. There is a hard core of people in the United States who will not be moved, whatever facts you present, from their conviction that this nation means only to do good, and almost always does good, in the world, that it is the beacon of liberty and freedom.

Howard Zinn

#48. One of the problems with dealing with anarchism is that there are many people whose ideas are anarchist, but who do not necessarily call themselves anarchists.

Howard Zinn

#49. To hell with your courts, I know what justice is.

Howard Zinn

#50. I do take the threat of terrorism seriously. You cannot eliminate that threat or diminish that threat by bombing a country.

Howard Zinn

#51. When [Ralph Waldo] Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, 'What are you doing in there?' it was reported that Thoreau replied, 'What are you doing out there?'

Howard Zinn

#52. In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.

Howard Zinn

#53. It's a strange thing, we think that law brings order. Law doesn't. How do we know that law does not bring order? Look around us. We live under the rule of law. Notice how much order we have?

Howard Zinn

#54. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can change the world.

Howard Zinn

#55. I am not an absolute pacifist, because I can't rule out the possibility that under some, carefully defined circumstances, some degree of violence may be justified, if it is focused directly at a great evil.

Howard Zinn

#56. If you want to end terrorism, you have to stop being terrorists

Howard Zinn

#57. But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.

Howard Zinn

#58. Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don't ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it.

Howard Zinn

#59. If what your country is doing seems to you practically and morally wrong, is dissent the highest form of patriotism?

Howard Zinn

#60. The true task of education, Alfred North Whitehead cautioned, is to abjure stale knowledge. "Knowledge does not keep any better than fish," he said. We need to keep it alive, vital, potent.

Howard Zinn

#61. There was an idea in the air, becoming clearer and stronger, an idea not just in the theories of Karl Marx but in the dreams of writers and artists through the ages: that people might cooperatively use the treasures of the earth to make life better for everyone, not just a few.

Howard Zinn

#62. But I was open to anything my students wanted to do, refusing to accept the idea that a teacher should confine his teaching to the classroom when so much was at stake outside it.

Howard Zinn

#63. If there is going to be change, real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves. That's how change happens.

Howard Zinn

#64. The fact that war belongs to the past, does not mean it has to be part of the future.

Howard Zinn

#65. There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color.

Howard Zinn

#66. Diverse audiences can be just as misled as homogenous audiences.

Howard Zinn

#67. Free white workers were better off than slaves or servants, but they still resented unfair treatment by the wealthier classes.

Howard Zinn

#68. War itself is the enemy of the human race.

Howard Zinn

#69. Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.

Howard Zinn

#70. When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant.

Howard Zinn

#71. If you don't know history, it is as if you were born yesterday.

Howard Zinn

#72. What happened in World War II was what happened in war generally, and that was whatever the initiating cause, and however clear the moral reason is for the war in which one side looks better than the other, by the time the war ends both sides have been engaged in evil.

Howard Zinn

#73. If racism can't be shown to be natural then it is the result of certain conditions, and we are impelled to eliminate those conditions.

Howard Zinn

#74. Music can be a distraction and an escape. Sometimes a welcome escape. You need it. But music can also serve a very important social function because music can do things that mere prose, mere ordinary political agitation can't do.

Howard Zinn

#75. Yes, we're dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don't want war. We don't want capitalism. We want a decent society.

Howard Zinn

#76. If you have an economic system in which there must be a lower class, there must be unemployed. There must be a large pool of people working at the worst jobs and the lowest paid jobs. Once you have a system like that, then the most likely people to be victims of that are people of color.

Howard Zinn

#77. When I say history is a matter of life and death, I mean this: If you really don't know history, you are a victim of whatever the authorities tell you. You have no way of checking up on them. You have no way of deciding whether there is any truth in what they are saying.

Howard Zinn

#78. My image of "a Communist" was not a Soviet bureaucrat but my friend Leon's father, a cabdriver who came home from work bruised and bloody one day, beaten up by his employer's goons (yes, that word was soon part of my vocabulary) for trying to organize his fellow cabdrivers into a union.

Howard Zinn

#79. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.

Howard Zinn

#80. Frazier said that the Negro middle class had borrowed its bourgeois style and traditional religion from the white middle class, which was itself intellectually and culturally barren. Black people should look to their own heritage, he said, create their own culture.

Howard Zinn

#81. I have no regrets about my political activity, only that I sometimes got carried away with it and didn't find the right balance between obligations to my family and my need to be involved in social movements.

Howard Zinn

#82. Crosses and gallows - that deadly historic juxtaposition.

Howard Zinn

#83. That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made
you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.

Howard Zinn

#84. We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

Howard Zinn

#85. New York blacks could not vote unless they owned $250 in property (a qualification not applied to whites).

Howard Zinn

#86. Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.

Howard Zinn

#87. Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make 257 dollars on every (black slave) in a year, and spend only 12 or 13 dollars on his keep.

Howard Zinn

#88. If you join a fight for social justice you may win or lose, but just by being part of the struggle, you win, and your life will be better for it.

Howard Zinn

#89. Imagine the American people united for the first time in a movement for fundamental change. Imagine society's power taken away from the giant corporations, the military, and the politicians who answer to corporate and military interests. We

Howard Zinn

#90. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

Howard Zinn

#91. They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution and they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America.

Howard Zinn

#92. Why do we have to be a military superpower? Why can't we be a humanitarian superpower?

Howard Zinn

#93. [T]hat combination of inferior status and derogatory thought [is what] we call racism.

Howard Zinn

#94. There was something horrifying in the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call 'civilization,' we have carved up what we claim is one world into 200 artificially created entities we call 'nations' and armed to apprehend or kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

Howard Zinn

#95. The rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and poverty in such calculated and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered.

Howard Zinn

#96. I didn't want to spent a lot of close time with someone who believed that fun is a bourgeois indulgence.

Howard Zinn

#97. in the industrial towns children went to work with their fathers and mothers, schools and doctors were only promises, a bed of one's own was a rare luxury.

Howard Zinn

#98. [Nationalism is] a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands.

Howard Zinn

#99. They didn't give their lives for their country! their lives were taken from them by their government.

Howard Zinn

#100. Use the Day of Atonement not to pray for the dead but to act for the living, to rescue those about to die.

Howard Zinn