Howard Zinn Quotes

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

We need to expose the motives of our political leaders, point out their connections to corporate pow...

We must recognize that we cannot depend on the governments of the world to abolish war because they ...

The government is an artificial creation, established by the people to defend everyone's equal right...

The argument that there are just wars often rests on the social system of the nation engaging in war...

Today everybody is talking about the fact that we live in one world; because of globalization, we ar...

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can supp...

My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the...

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

What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor--inculcated from childhood on ...

Some of the New York Radical Women shortly afterward formed WITCH (Women's International Terrorist C...

Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dange...

Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor shortly after...

In the problem of women was the germ of a solution, not only for their oppression, but for everybody...

The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich...

The Constitution. . . illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interest...

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an...

If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and telev...

If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I...

How can you have a war on terrorism while war itself is terrorism!

In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign p...

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

I'm worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful co...

There is a power that can be created out of pent-up indignation, courage, and the inspiration of a c...

History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easi...

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

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

But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are ...

You can't be neutral on a moving train.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government...

I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives wh...

I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could s...

That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a p...

Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some t...

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothi...

But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter ...

I see this as the central issue of our time: how to find a substitute for war in human ingenuity, im...

The courtroom is one instance of the fact that while our society may be liberal and democratic in so...

Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.

The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities ...

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should li...

I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in soci...

The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured....

Human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be...

Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to ac...

If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive worship to flags...

Against the claims of a violent "human nature" there is enormous historical evidence that people, wh...

When private bands of fanatics commit atrocities we call them "terrorists," which they are, and have...

The essential ingredients of these struggles for justice are human beings who, if only for a moment,...

There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the ...

Emma Willard told the legislature that the education of women "has been too exclusively directed to ...

We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or t...

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

Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.

How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top o...

In his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson contrasts law and in the Congo in the early 16th...

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

So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.

TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human histor...

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

History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were...

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

We will not know unless we begin.