Top 280 Howard Zinn Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured.”

— Howard Zinn

52. “Crosses and gallows – that deadly historic juxtaposition.”

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

54. “To ward off alienation and gloom, it is only necessary to remember the unremembered heroes of the past, and to look around us for the unnoticed heroes of the present.”

— Howard Zinn

55. “The establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain it’s control, kill us.”

— Howard Zinn

56. “The only hope lies in the fact that the American people – like people everywhere – are basically decent people with common sense.”

— Howard Zinn

57. “But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.”

— Howard Zinn

58. “To hell with your courts, I know what justice is.”

— Howard Zinn

59. “Very important thing to keep in mind, that when justice comes and when injustices are remedied, they’re not remedied by the initiative of the national government or the politicians. They only respond to the power of social movements.”

— Howard Zinn

60. “Is there a “national interest” when a few people decide on war, and huge numbers of others – here and abroad – are killed or crippled as a result of such a decision? Should citizens not ask in whose interest are we doing what we are doing? Then why not, I came to think, tell the story of wars not through the eyes of the generals and diplomats but from the viewpoints of the GIs, of the parents who received the black-bordered telegrams, even of “the enemy.”

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

62. “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

63. “If you don’t know history, it is as if you were born yesterday.”

— Howard Zinn

64. “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.”

— Howard Zinn

65. “Why do we have to be a military superpower? Why can’t we be a humanitarian superpower?”

— Howard Zinn

66. “Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.”

— Howard Zinn

67. “Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don’t ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it.”

— Howard Zinn

68. “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.”

— Howard Zinn

69. “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.”

— Howard Zinn

70. “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

71. “Our ethos is all that we currently hold to be true. It is what we act upon. It governs our manners, our business, and our politics.”

— Howard Zinn

72. “In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.”

— Howard Zinn

73. “I suggest that if you know history, then you might not be so easily fooled by the government when it tells you you must go to war for this or that reason -that history is a protective armor against being misled.”

— Howard Zinn

74. “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

75. “War itself is the enemy of the human race.”

— Howard Zinn

76. “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

77. “If you want to end terrorism, you have to stop being terrorists.”

— Howard Zinn

78. “But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world – by a teacher, a writer, anyone – is a judgement. The judgement that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.”

— Howard Zinn

79. “When a nation issues ultimatums, it leaves no room for compromise and ensures that war will continue.”

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

81. “Since war itself is the most extreme form of terrorism, a war on terrorism is profoundly self-contradictory.”

— Howard Zinn

82. “One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.”

— Howard Zinn

83. “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.”

— Howard Zinn

84. “But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.”

— Howard Zinn

85. “From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country-and failed. When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won.”

— Howard Zinn

86. “People should go where they are not supposed to go, say what they are not supposed to say, and stay when they are told to leave.”

— Howard Zinn

87. “What if citizens organized to demand what the Declaration of Independence promised: a government that protected the equal rights of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? This would call for an economic system that distributed wealth in a thoughtful and humane way. It would mean a culture where young people were not taught to seek success as a mask for greed. Throughout.”

— Howard Zinn

88. “A writer in early 1930, boosting the beauty business, started off a magazine article with the sentence: “The average American woman has sixteen square feet of skin.”

— Howard Zinn

89. “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

90. “The awful scenes of death and suffering we were witnessing on our television screens have been going on in other parts of the world for a long time, and only now can we begin to know what people have gone through, often as a result of our policies.”

— Howard Zinn

91. “Will Iraq be a democracy? The question is, ‘Will America be a democracy?’”

— Howard Zinn

92. “Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves and the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”

— Howard Zinn

93. “The fact that war belongs to the past, does not mean it has to be part of the future.”

— Howard Zinn

94. “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

95. “There is the past and its continuing horrors: violence, war, prejudices against those who are different, outrageous monopolization of the good earth’s wealth by a few, political power in the hands of liars and murderers, the building of prisons instead of schools, the poisoning of the press and the entire culture by money. It is easy to become discouraged observing this, especially since this is what the press and television insist that we look at, and nothing more.”

— Howard Zinn

96. “That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made – you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.”

— Howard Zinn

97. “You call this progress, because you have motor cars and telephones and flying machines and a thousand potions to make you smell better? And people sleeping on the streets?”

— Howard Zinn

98. “Diverse audiences can be just as misled as homogenous audiences.”

— Howard Zinn

99. “One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression. Patriotism becomes the order of the day, and those who question the war are seen as traitors, to be silenced and imprisoned.”

— Howard Zinn

100. “In a system of intimidation and control, people do not show how much they know, how deeply they feel, until their practical sense informs them they can do so without being destroyed.”

— Howard Zinn