Top 280 Howard Zinn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

— Howard Zinn

Featured in: Changing the World Quotes, Resistance Quotes, Moving Quotes, Justice Quotes, History Quotes

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

— Howard Zinn

Featured in: Morality Quotes, Peace Quotes, Suffering Quotes, Justice Quotes, Quotes About War

3. “Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.”

— Howard Zinn

Featured in: Hard Hitting Quotes, Resistance Quotes, Quotes About War

4. “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

Featured in: Changing the World Quotes, Engagement Quotes

5. “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

6. “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.”

— Howard Zinn

Featured in: Resilience Quotes, Quotes About Humanity, Compassion Quotes, Sacrifice Quotes

7. “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”

— Howard Zinn

8. “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

9. “Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.”

— Howard Zinn

10. “The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

12. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

13. “Education can, and should be, dangerous.”

— Howard Zinn

14. “Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”

— Howard Zinn

15. “There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at critical points to create a power that governments cannot suppress.”

— Howard Zinn

16. “Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.”

— Howard Zinn

17. “How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

19. “We all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long-held ideas.”

— Howard Zinn

20. “Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.”

— Howard Zinn

21. “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

22. “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.”

— Howard Zinn

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.”

— Howard Zinn

27. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

28. “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

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

— Howard Zinn

30. “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

31. “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

32. “Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power than can transform the world.”

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

34. “War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.”

— Howard Zinn

35. “When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant.”

— Howard Zinn

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

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

— Howard Zinn

40. “In war, good guys always become bad guys.”

— Howard Zinn

41. “You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” I would tell them. Some were baffled by the metaphor, especially if they took it literally and tried to dissect its meaning. Others immediately saw what I meant: that events are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that.”

— Howard Zinn

42. “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.”

— Howard Zinn

43. “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

44. “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

45. “The challenge remains. On the other side are formidable forces: money, political power, the major media. On our side are the people of the world and a power greater than money or weapons: the truth.”

— Howard Zinn

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

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

— Howard Zinn

Featured in: Country Quotes