Howard Zinn Quotes

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

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

I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.

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

The future is an infinite succession of presents.

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.

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

One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness – in communities, in institutions, among friends.

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.

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?'

Most wars, after all, present themselves as humanitarian endeavors to help people.

[W]e're taught that if one person kills another person, that is murder; but if a government kills a hundred thousand persons, that is patriotism.

And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

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

War itself is the enemy of the human race.

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

Diverse audiences can be just as misled as homogenous audiences.

That's generally true of people who drop bombs from high altitudes. You don't know what's going on below. You don't see the human consequences of what you're doing.

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

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

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.

...Surely, we must renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

In war, good guys always become bad guys.

Any humane and reasonable person must conclude that if the ends, however desireable, are uncertain and the means are horrible and certain, these means must not be employed.

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

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

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.

War in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.

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

If the gods had intended for people to vote, they would have given us candidates.

In between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.

Democracy depends on people speaking out, and in times of great crisis, on people creating a commotion.

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

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

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.

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

Being fired has some of the advantages of dying without its supreme disadvantages. People say extra-nice things about you, and you get to hear them.

I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.

Will Iraq be a democracy? The question is, 'Will America be a democracy?'

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

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

It was an old lesson learned by governments: that war solves problems of control.

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.