Quotes About Howard Zinn

#1. Howard Zinn wrote in 1988, in what now seems like a lost world before so many political upheavals and technological changes arrived, "As this century draws to a close, a century packed with history, what leaps out from that history is its utter unpredictability.

Rebecca Solnit

#2. Imagine Jon Stewart if he gave a damn. He's like Howard Zinn after 12 beers.

David Swanson

#3. Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.

Alice Walker

#4. I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.

Alice Walker

#5. But however imperfect, even repugnant, were particular policies, particular actions, there remained the purity of the ideal, represented in the theories of Karl Marx and the noble visions of many lesser thinkers and writers.

Howard Zinn

#6. Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee ...

Howard Zinn

#7. What motivates me is the desire to bring up a whole new generation of active citizens who believe in peace and social justice and will work for it.

Howard Zinn

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

Howard Zinn

#9. Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

Howard Zinn

#10. Racism was becoming more and more practical.

Howard Zinn

#11. But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power.

Howard Zinn

#12. How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?

Howard Zinn

#13. 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

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

Howard Zinn

#15. We need to expose the motives of our political leaders, point out their connections to corporate power, show how huge profits are being made out of death and suffering.

Howard Zinn

#16. The establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain it's control, kill us

Howard Zinn

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. I believe the American people have the capacity to create a new movement, which would change the direction of our nation from being a military power to being a peaceful nation, using our enormous wealth for human needs, here and abroad.

Howard Zinn

#20. I wonder how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own.

Howard Zinn

#21. I always emphasize the historic role of people of color in organizing and protesting to achieve justice.

Howard Zinn

#22. 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

#23. Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

Howard Zinn

#24. 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

#25. We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.

Howard Zinn

#26. The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of 'important', of course, depends on one's values.

Howard Zinn

#27. I can UNDERSTAND pessimism, but I don't BELIEVE in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical EVIDENCE. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give HOPE, because for hope we don't need certainty, only POSSIBILITY.

Howard Zinn

#28. 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

#29. Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?

Howard Zinn

#30. There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged.

Howard Zinn

#31. 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

#32. Charles Beard warned us that governments-inc luding the government of the United States-are not neutral, that they represent the dominant economic interests, and that their Constitutions are intended to serve these interests.

Howard Zinn

#33. But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is ... to tell the truth.

Howard Zinn

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

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

Howard Zinn

#40. 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

#41. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interest, where any chosen emphasis supports some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial, or national or sexual.

Howard Zinn

#42. People of the United States have to really consider whether they want to be an empire. Sweden is not worried about terrorism. New Zealand is not worried about terrorism. Holland is not worried about terrorism. Why not be a modest little country without all of these enormous ambitions?

Howard Zinn

#43. Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.

Howard Zinn

#44. When in all the nations of the world the rule of law is the darling of the leaders and the plague of the people, we ought to begin to recognize this.

Howard Zinn

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. When people don't understand that the government doesn't have their interests in mind, they're more susceptible to go to war.

Howard Zinn

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

Howard Zinn

#49. You call this progress, because you have motor cars and telephones and flying machines and a thousand potions to make you smell better? And people sleeping on the streets?

Howard Zinn

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

Howard Zinn

#51. He estimates that perhaps 250,000 slaves were imported illegally before the Civil War.

Howard Zinn

#52. 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.

Howard Zinn

#53. The resources of a university, of a college, should not be wasted in merely academic pursuits.

Howard Zinn

#54. But slave importation became illegal in 1808.

Howard Zinn

#55. Group meditation according to Jon Kabat

Howard Zinn

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. I am an anarchist, and according to anarchist principles nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization.

Howard Zinn

#60. What we have is a more sophisticated form of imperialism, which is economic. But lurking in the background, always ready to go, is an armed force.

Howard Zinn

#61. 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

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

Howard Zinn

#63. 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

#64. That whole idea of threats to national security is a very interesting one. The phrase is very useful for the government to try to encompass the citizenry in the same box as the government is in. To say, "We're all in this together. It threatens all of us."

Howard Zinn

#65. The future is an infinite succession of presents

Howard Zinn

#66. You can't be neutral on a moving train.

Howard Zinn

#67. I was a bombadier in WW 2. When you are up 30,000 feet you do not hear the screams or smell the blood or see those without limbs or eyes. It was not til I read Hersey's Hiroshima that I realized what bomber pilots do.

Howard Zinn

#68. Civil disobedience is not something outside the realm of democracy. Democracy requires civil disobedience. Without civil disobedience democracy does not exist.

Howard Zinn

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. The awful scenes of death and suffering we were witnessing on our television screens have been going on in other parts of the world for a long time, and only now can we begin to know what people have gone through, often as a result of our policies.

Howard Zinn

#72. Again and again, Americans have voted for a president to keep them out of a war, only to see the "peace" candidate elected who then brings the nation into war.

Howard Zinn

#73. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.

Howard Zinn

#74. 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

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

Howard Zinn

#76. I lay back on my bunk and thought about people I love, and how lucky I was to be white and not poor and just passing briefly through a system which is a permanent hell for so many.

Howard Zinn

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

Howard Zinn

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves - unwittingly - to justify what was done.

Howard Zinn

#81. In a two-party system, if both parties ignore public opinion, there is no place voters can turn.

Howard Zinn

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

Howard Zinn

#83. Our ethos is all that we currently hold to be true. It is what we act upon. It governs our manners, our business, and our politics.

Howard Zinn

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

Howard Zinn

#85. 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

#86. Since war itself is the most extreme form of terrorism, a war on terrorism is profoundly self-contradictory.

Howard Zinn

#87. But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world - by a teacher, a writer, anyone - is a judgement. The judgement that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.

Howard Zinn

#88. The United States builds weapons presumably secretly, and then it sells them to other countries. So the whole business of secrecy is kind of a fake issue because hardly anything technological remains a secret for very long.

Howard Zinn

#89. A writer in early 1930, boosting the beauty business, started off a magazine article with the sentence: The average American woman has sixteen square feet of skin.

Howard Zinn

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. Then Gregory lowered his voice, suddenly serious. "But it looks like we got to do it the hard way, and stay down here, and educate them.

Howard Zinn

#93. 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

#94. To ward off alienation and gloom, it is only necessary to remember the unremembered heroes of the past, and to look around us for the unnoticed heroes of the present.

Howard Zinn

#95. Catholic Church, expelled all the Jews,

Howard Zinn

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

Howard Zinn

#97. The only hope lies in the fact that the American people - like people everywhere - are basically decent people with common sense.

Howard Zinn

#98. 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

#99. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.

Howard Zinn

#100. We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children

Howard Zinn