Top 100 Zinn's Quotes
#1. Thoughts come and go. It's impossible to stop your thoughts, but the idea is that the thoughts are kind of like waves on the ocean. That's Jon Kabat-Zinn's big analogy and that this is actually kind of diving under the waves. And you know it's kind of interesting.
Anderson Cooper
#2. 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
#3. Breathing is central to every aspect of meditation training. It's a wonderful place to focus in training the mind to be calm and concentrated.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#4. There are many different aspects to a formal meditation practice. But the real meditation practice is how you interface with life from moment-to-moment, no matter what's happening. Especially when you are awake, which is pretty much most of the time except for deep sleep.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#5. One way to look at meditation is as a kind of intrapsychic technology that's been developed over thousands of years by traditions that know a lot about the mind/body connection.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#6. Let's face a historical truth: we have never had a "free market", we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with "big government" when it served their needs.
Howard Zinn
#7. Obviously, the duty of artists is there, but it's more an indictment of the political system that someone like Zinn views artists as the seers, idealizing them as the people responsible for inspiring change.
Thom Yorke
#8. 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
#10. Mindful parenting is the hardest job on the planet, but it's also one that has the potential for the deepest kinds of satisfactions over the life span, and the greatest feelings of interconnectedness and community and belonging.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#11. Mindfulness is often spoken of as the heart of Buddhist meditation. It's not about Buddhism, but about paying attention. That's what all meditation is, no matter what tradition or particular technique is used.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#12. But we're not being educated in how to be, only in how to accomplish. So it's all about acquisition, about getting stuff we don't have ... As soon as you realize it's a thought pattern, you can write yourself a restraining order.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#13. Ariana, there's a small rodent on your face. Thought you should know."
"It's a mustache. Kyra assured me that it's extremely convincing.
Bridget Zinn
#14. The 'find it, fix it 'model of medicine doesn't work any more. The U.S. healthcare system is bankrupting the country, bankrolling the insurance companies and exhausting healthcare staff. And despite all that, we are ranked 50th in the world for life expectancy.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#15. "What is my job on the planet?" is one question we might do well to ask ourselves over and over again. Otherwise, we may wind up doing somebody else's job and not even know it. And what's more, that somebody else might be a figment of our own imagination, and maybe a prisoner of it as well.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#16. It is not that mindfulness is the "answer" to all life's problems. Rather, it is that all life's problems can be seen more clearly through the lens of a clear mind.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#17. 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
#18. Even before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that's compounded by a factor of trillions.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#19. The real meditative practice is to open up to the full range of what happens in life. And parenting is a fantastic arena for doing that kind of spiritual training. It's as much a potential door into enlightenment as anything else.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#20. Sometimes it's a short step from banning to burning.
Howard Zinn
#21. 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
#22. Carl Jung put it this way: "The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one's whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises." With
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Discipline provides a constancy which is independent of what kind of day you had yesterday and what kind of day you anticipate today.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#26. 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
#27. Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.
Howard Zinn
#28. 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
#29. But you cannot have harmony without a commitment to ethical behavior. It's the fence that keeps out the goats that will eat all the young shoots in your garden.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#30. Above all, meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment. It's not about getting somewhere else, but about allowing yourself to be where you already are.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#31. I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president - which means, in our time, a dangerous president - unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.
Howard Zinn
#32. 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
#33. War is terrorism ... Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause. That's what terrorists are about.
Howard Zinn
#34. Okay, that one's pretty good," Fred acknowledged, after she'd told him a particularly filthy joke. "But have you heard the one about the baker's wife?"
"No," Kyra said.
"Rumor has it, she married him for his buns." Fred burst out laughing.
Kyra groaned. "Okay, that was just bad.
Bridget Zinn
#35. The mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction-so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements-that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission.
Howard Zinn
#36. The mind that has not been developed or trained is very scattered. That's the normal state of affairs, but it leaves us out of touch with a great deal in life, including our bodies.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#37. Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It's about feeling the way you feel.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#38. 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
#39. Zen has an expression, "nothing special." When you understand "nothing special," you realize that everything is special. Everything's special and nothing's special. Everything's spiritual and nothing's spiritual. It's how you see, it's what eyes you're looking through, that matters.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#40. 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
#41. It's very important as a beginner that you understand right from the start that meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#42. The U.S. government did not seem to recognize that its punitive foreign policies, its military installations in countries all over the globe, might arouse anger in foreign countries, and that anger might turn to violence.
Howard Zinn
#43. Are terrorists going to be deterred
are terrorists going to be scared if we react violently? No. They love it. That's what they dote on. They dote on violence. They dote on having more reasons to commit more terrorism.
Howard Zinn
#44. How you look isn't about the face you were born with, it's what you do with it.
Bridget Zinn
#45. 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
#46. If you can't entirely trust what you think, what about trusting awareness? What about trusting your heart? What about trusting your motivation to at least do no harm? What about trusting your experience until it's proven to be inaccurate - and then trusting that discovery?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#47. Imagine Jon Stewart if he gave a damn. He's like Howard Zinn after 12 beers.
David Swanson
#48. (Jefferson's personal distaste for slavery must be put alongside the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves to the day he died).
Howard Zinn
#49. Generally speaking, if people are prepared to stick their heads above the power pit, like Zinn says, and absorb what's going on around them, it makes them think.
Thom Yorke
#50. We overestimate the power of people who become cogs in giant organizations. The fact that they become cogs actually limits what they can do ... There's something very corrupting that happens to people who think they're going to work from inside a corrupt system.
Howard Zinn
#51. Nourishing the soul is the process of drinking at the life stream, coming back to one's true self, embracing the whole of one's experience - good, bad, or ugly; painful or exalted; dull or boring.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. It is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from other animals. We can be aware of being aware.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#57. 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
#58. The establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain it's control, kill us
Howard Zinn
#59. Note that this journey is uniquely yours, no one else's. So the path has to be your own. You cannot imitate somebody else's journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#60. 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
#61. They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.
Howard Zinn
#62. Meditation is neither shutting things out nor off. It is seeing things clearly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#63. A willingness to embrace and work with what is lies at the core of all meditation practice.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#64. [R]emain open to not knowing, perhaps allowing yourself to come to the point of admitting, "I don't know," and then experimenting with relaxing a bit into this not knowing instead of condemning yourself for it. After all, in this moment, it may be an accurate statement of how things are for you.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#65. I always emphasize the historic role of people of color in organizing and protesting to achieve justice.
Howard Zinn
#66. How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?
Howard Zinn
#67. 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
#68. Racism was becoming more and more practical.
Howard Zinn
#69. Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
Howard Zinn
#70. Too much of the education system orients students toward becoming better thinkers, but there is almost no focus on our capacity to pay attention and cultivate awareness.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#72. Even the tiniest manifestation of mindfulness in any moment might give rise to an intuition or insight that could be hugely transforming.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#73. Even if you assume presidents were democratically elected they still have no right to keep secrets from the American people.
Howard Zinn
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Perhaps ultimately, spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous. If you see in this way, then everything becomes spiritual in its deepest sense.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#79. 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
#80. But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is ... to tell the truth.
Howard Zinn
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. No one can listen to your body for you ... To grow and heal, you have to take responsibility for listening to it yourself.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#84. 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
#85. Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?
Howard Zinn
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Dying without actually fully living, without waking up to our lives while we have the chance, is an ongoing and significant risk.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#89. Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#90. We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
Howard Zinn
#91. To be patient is simply to be completely open to each moment, accepting it in its fullness, knowing that, like the butterfly, things can only unfold in their own time.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#92. 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
#93. Anybody who is imitating somebody else, no matter who it us, is heading in the wrong direction. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#94. Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.
Howard Zinn
#95. Attention leads to connection, connection to regulation, regulation to order, and order to ease (as opposed to dis-ease), or, more colloquially, to health.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#96. Rarely are we in touch with who is doing the doing - or, put otherwise, with the world of being. To
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#97. From the point of view of the meditative traditions the entire society is suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#98. Rather, it is bearing in mind what is most important to you so that it is not lost or betrayed in the heat and reactivity of a particular moment.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#99. So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#100. 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
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