Top 280 Howard Zinn Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “We must transfer our anger to the brutalities of our time.”

— Howard Zinn

102. “When people don’t understand that the government doesn’t have their interests in mind, they’re more susceptible to go to war.”

— Howard Zinn

103. “The Roman Empire came to an end, but the Roman people didn’t come to an end, so I see the American Empire coming to an end just as other empires have come to an end.”

— Howard Zinn

104. “When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won.”

— Howard Zinn

105. “The strike, the boycott, the refusal to serve, the ability to paralyze the functioning of a complex social structure-these remain potent weapons against the most fearsome state or corporate power.”

— Howard Zinn

106. “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

107. “But how can the judgment be made if the benefits and losses cannot be balanced because the losses are either unmentioned or mentioned quickly?”

— Howard Zinn

108. “To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves – unwittingly – to justify what was done.”

— Howard Zinn

109. “And so it went, in industry after industry – shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the “welfare state.”

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

111. “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.”

— Howard Zinn

112. “Group meditation according to Jon Kabat.”

— Howard Zinn

113. “No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class.”

— Howard Zinn

114. “The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interest, where any chosen emphasis supports some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial, or national or sexual.”

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

116. “Sometimes it’s a short step from banning to burning.”

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

119. “In the Mexican War, a skirmish between Mexican and American troops on the Texas-Mexico border led President Polk to state that “American blood has been shed on American soil,” and to ask Congress for war. Actually, the encounter took place in disputed territory, and Polk’s diary shows that he wanted an excuse for war so the United States could take from Mexico what the United States coveted, California and the whole Southwest.”

— Howard Zinn

120. “Even allowing for the imperfection of myths, it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization.”

— Howard Zinn

121. “Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used by Europeans to justify their own slave trade. But, as Davidson points out, the “slaves” of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe – in other words, like most of the population of Europe.”

— Howard Zinn

122. “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.”

— Howard Zinn

123. “Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need for space, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition, this human need was transformed into.”

— Howard Zinn

124. “Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is.”

— Howard Zinn

125. “I have no regrets about my political activity, only that I sometimes got carried away with it and didn’t find the right balance between obligations to my family and my need to be involved in social movements.”

— Howard Zinn

126. “We better rethink the position of the United States in the world and whether we want to be an empire. Being an empire puts all of us in jeopardy. The American Empire, while it was just wreaking havoc on other nations, didn’t bother us.”

— Howard Zinn

127. “They didn’t give their lives for their country! their lives were taken from them by their government.”

— Howard Zinn

128. “I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.”

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

130. “I think of Charles Sherrod. He was a SNCC “field secretary” and one of those young people who went into the toughest towns in the deep South to set up Freedom Houses and help local folk organize to change their lives.”

— Howard Zinn

131. “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.”

— Howard Zinn

132. “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

133. “Women were important and respected in Iroquois society. Families were matrilineal. That is, the family line went down through the female members, whose husbands joined the family, while sons who married then joined their wives’ families. Each extended family lived in a “long house.” When a woman wanted a divorce, she set her husband’s things outside the door.”

— Howard Zinn

134. “Aldous Huxley: “Liberties are not given, they are taken.”

— Howard Zinn

135. “My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been.”

— Howard Zinn

136. “Strike is always a form of direct action. With the strike, too, you are not asking government to make things easier for you by passing legislation, you are taking a direct action against the employer.”

— Howard Zinn

137. “Jackson became a national hero when in 1814 he fought the Battle of Horseshoe Bend against a thousand Creeks and killed eight hundred of them, with few casualties on his side. His white troops had failed in a frontal attack on the Creeks, but the Cherokees with him, promised governmental friendship if they joined the war, swam the river, came up behind the Creeks, and won the battle for Jackson.”

— Howard Zinn

138. “The country therefore was not “born free” but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich.”

— Howard Zinn

139. “A historian who studied Boston tax lists in 1687 and 1771 found that in 1687 there were, out of a population of six thousand, about one thousand property owners, and that the top 5 percent – 1 percent of the population – consisted of fifty rich individuals who had 25 percent of the wealth. By 1770, the top 1 percent of property owners owned 44 percent of the wealth.”

— Howard Zinn

140. “Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war?”

— Howard Zinn

141. “And one woman wrote, in 1850, in the book Greenwood Leaves: “True feminine genius is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood.” Another book, Recollections of a Southern Matron: “If any habit of his annoyed me, I spoke of it once or twice, calmly, then bore it quietly.” Giving women “Rules for Conjugal and Domestic Happiness,” one book ended with: “Do not expect too much.”

— Howard Zinn

142. “Charles Beard warned us that governments-inc luding the government of the United States-are not neutral, that they represent the dominant economic interests, and that their Constitutions are intended to serve these interests.”

— Howard Zinn

143. “He estimates that perhaps 250,000 slaves were imported illegally before the Civil War.”

— Howard Zinn

144. “In the vision of the Mohawk chief Hiawatha, the legendary Dekaniwidah spoke to the Iroquois: “We bind ourselves together by taking hold of each other’s hands so firmly and forming a circle so strong that if a tree should fall upon it, it could not shake nor break it, so that our people and grandchildren shall remain in the circle in security, peace and happiness.”

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

146. “The colonies, it seems, were societies of contending classes – a fact obscured by the emphasis, in traditional histories, on the external struggle against England, the unity of colonists in the Revolution. The country therefore was not “born free” but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich.”

— Howard Zinn

147. “The military conflict itself, by dominating everything in its time, diminished other issues, made people choose sides in the one contest that was publicly important, forced people onto the side of the Revolution whose interest in Independence was not at all obvious. Ruling elites seem to have learned through the generations – consciously or not – that war makes them more secure against internal trouble.”

— Howard Zinn

148. “If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love. We must have compassion and understanding for those who hate us. We must realize so many people are taught to hate us that they are not totally responsible for their hate. But we stand in life at midnight, we are always on the threshold of a new dawn.”

— Howard Zinn

149. “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.”

— Howard Zinn

150. “We have here a forecast of the long history of American politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes.”

— Howard Zinn