“You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
— Howard Zinn
“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
“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.”
“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”
“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.”
“Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Civil disobedience is not something outside the realm of democracy. Democracy requires civil disobedience. Without civil disobedience democracy does not exist.”
“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.”
“Education can, and should be, dangerous.”
“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”
“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.”
“Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.”
“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.”
“Use the Day of Atonement not to pray for the dead but to act for the living, to rescue those about to die.”
“Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.”
“How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”
“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.”
“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.”
“Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.”
“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.”
“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.”
“War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant.”
“Crosses and gallows – that deadly historic juxtaposition.”
“Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.”
“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.”
“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.”
“They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.”
“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.”
“Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”
“If you don’t know history, it is as if you were born yesterday.”
“When we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress.”
“It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.”
“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.”
“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.”
“In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.”
“Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.”
“I am not an absolute pacifist, because I can’t rule out the possibility that under some, carefully defined circumstances, some degree of violence may be justified, if it is focused directly at a great evil.”
“If what your country is doing seems to you practically and morally wrong, is dissent the highest form of patriotism?”
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