Top 280 Howard Zinn Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I do take the threat of terrorism seriously. You cannot eliminate that threat or diminish that threat by bombing a country.”

— Howard Zinn

102. “If Chomsky says the educational system is an undemocratic system, you can say, well, you’re there, you have a position at MIT. Well, it’s perfectly attuned to the American system of control, a very sophisticated system of control that allows just enough dissidence so that those in power can point to the fact that the university is democratic but not enough dissidence to create a real danger to the system.”

— Howard Zinn

103. “In 1992, teachers all over the country, by the thousands, were beginning to teach the Columbus story in new ways, to recognize that to Native Americans, Columbus and his men were not heroes, but marauders. The point being not just to revise our view of past events, but to be provoked to think about today.”

— Howard Zinn

104. “Even if you assume presidents were democratically elected they still have no right to keep secrets from the American people.”

— Howard Zinn

105. “We must transfer our anger to the brutalities of our time.”

— Howard Zinn

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Howard Zinn

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “Group meditation according to Jon Kabat.”

— Howard Zinn

114. “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

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

— Howard Zinn

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

122. “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

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

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

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

— 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. “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

135. “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

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

— Howard Zinn

137. “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

138. “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

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

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

— Howard Zinn

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

— Howard Zinn

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

150. “There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color.”

— Howard Zinn