Top 280 Howard Zinn Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Police, I learned over the years, are like soldiers, normally good-natured people, but part of a culture of obedience to orders and capable of brutal acts against anyone designated as “the enemy” – in this case, the antiwar movement.”

— Howard Zinn

154. “Bacon gave his reasons for the rebellion in a paper called “Declaration of the People.” It blended the frontiersmen’s hatred of the Indians with the common people’s anger toward the rich. Bacon accused the Berkeley government of wrongdoing, including unfair taxes and not protecting the western farmers from the Indians.”

— Howard Zinn

155. “I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions – poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed – which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.”

— Howard Zinn

156. “The future is an infinite succession of presents.”

— Howard Zinn

157. “They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution and they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America.”

— Howard Zinn

158. “The well-paid leaders of the AFL were protected from criticism by tightly controlled meetings and by “goon” squads – hired toughs originally used against strikebreakers but after a while used to intimidate and beat up opponents inside the union.”

— Howard Zinn

159. “I could only think one troubling thought: the police, the state, did the bidding of the holders of great wealth. How much freedom of speech and freedom of assembly you had depended on what class you were in.”

— Howard Zinn

160. “In the summer of 1863, a “Song of the Conscripts” was circulated by the thousands in New York and other cities. One stanza: We’re coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more We leave our homes and firesides with bleeding hearts and sore Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to thy decree; We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase liberty.”

— Howard Zinn

161. “Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely the path that is your life. – Jon Kabat.”

— Howard Zinn

162. “Is not Life miserable enough, comes not Death soon enough, without resort to the hideous enginery of War?”

— Howard Zinn

163. “The laws that took the vote away from blacks – poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications – also often ensured that poor whites would not vote. And the political leaders of the South knew this.”

— Howard Zinn

164. “When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, “there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines.”

— Howard Zinn

165. “Here was the traditional device by which those in charge of any social order mobilize and discipline a recalcitrant population – offering the adventure and rewards of military service to get poor people to fight for a cause they may not see clearly as their own.”

— Howard Zinn

166. “Only one fear was greater than the fear of black rebellion in the new American colonies.”

— Howard Zinn

167. “As many as half the people were not even considered by the Founding Fathers as among Bailyn’s “contending powers” in society. They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution, they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America.”

— Howard Zinn

168. “Ruling elites seem to have learned through the generations – consciously or not – that war makes them more secure against internal trouble.”

— Howard Zinn

169. “When in all the nations of the world the rule of law is the darling of the leaders and the plague of the people, we ought to begin to recognize this.”

— Howard Zinn

170. “The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.”

— Howard Zinn

171. “Are terrorists going to be deterred – are terrorists going to be scared if we react violently? No. They love it. That’s what they dote on. They dote on violence. They dote on having more reasons to commit more terrorism.”

— Howard Zinn

172. “These people – the employed, the somewhat privileged – are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.”

— Howard Zinn

173. “I said, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern blacks did, as antiwar protesters did.”

— Howard Zinn

174. “The owners of factories are more concerned than other classes and interests in the intelligence of their laborers. When the latter are well-educated and the former are disposed to deal justly, controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factious considerations.”

— Howard Zinn

175. “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. It was a harsh servitude, but they had rights which slaves brought to America did not have, and they were “altogether different from the human cattle of the slave ships and the American plantations.”

— Howard Zinn

176. “I had volunteered for the Air Force and was an enthusiastic bombardier. While dropping bombs on Europe, I generally didn’t understand what I was doing.”

— Howard Zinn

177. “What motivates me is the desire to bring up a whole new generation of active citizens who believe in peace and social justice and will work for it.”

— Howard Zinn

178. “The government is an artificial creation, established by the people to defend everyone’s equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And when the government does not fulfill that obligation, it is the right of the people, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, to ‘alter or abolish’ the government.”

— Howard Zinn

179. “I’ve always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn’t worked hard enough. I knew this was a lie, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed.”

— Howard Zinn

180. “The essential ingredients of these struggles for justice are human beings who, if only for a moment, if only while beset with fears, step out of line and do “something”, however small. And even the smallest, most unheroic of acts adds to the store of kindling that may be ignited by some surprising circumstance into tumultuous change.”

— Howard Zinn

181. “It was the new politics of ambiguity – speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their support in times of rapid growth and potential turmoil. The two-party system came into its own in this time. To give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of control.”

— Howard Zinn

182. “History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history – while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance – might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth.”

— Howard Zinn

183. “We used military force to establish American power in Cuba and Puerto Rico, in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in Central America, in Hawaii and the Philippines.”

— Howard Zinn

184. “There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the government of the United States.”

— Howard Zinn

185. “Revolutionary America may have been a middle-class society, happier and more prosperous than any other in its time, but it contained a large and growing number of fairly poor people, and many of them did much of the actual fighting and suffering between 1775 and 1783: A very old story.”

— Howard Zinn

186. “The “mystique” that Friedan spoke of was the image of the woman as mother, wife, living through her husband, through her children, giving up her own dreams for that. She concluded: “The only way for a woman as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”

— Howard Zinn

187. “Artists in Times of War The Bomb Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law.”

— Howard Zinn

188. “There is an extent of riches, as well as an extreme of poverty, which, by harrowing the circles of a man’s acquaintance, lessens his opportunities of general knowledge.”

— Howard Zinn

189. “Whatever we poor men may not have, we have free speech, and no one can take it from us.”

— Howard Zinn

190. “The reward for participating in a movement for social justice is not the prospect of future victory. It is the exhilaration of standing together with other people, taking risks together, enjoying small triumphs and enduring disheartening setbacks – together.”

— Howard Zinn

191. “This unequal treatment, this developing combination of contempt and oppression, feeling and action, which we call “racism” – was this the result of a “natural” antipathy of white against black? The question is important, not just as a matter of historical accuracy, but because any emphasis on “natural” racism lightens the responsibility of the social system. 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

192. “Black civil rights activists in the South were among the first to resist the draft. SNCC’s Bob Moses joined historian Staughton Lynd and veteran pacifist Dave Dellinger to march in Washington against the war, and Life Magazine had a dramatic photo of the three of them walking abreast, being splattered with red paint by angry super-patriots.”

— Howard Zinn

193. “Thus it could moderate labor rebellion by channeling energy into elections – just as the constitutional system channeled possibly troublesome energy into voting.”

— Howard Zinn

194. “The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”

— Howard Zinn

195. “His friend and fellow writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, agreed, but thought it futile to protest. When Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “What are you doing in there?” it was reported that Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out there?”

— Howard Zinn

196. “The hands of Hitler were filthy, but those of the United States were not clean. Our government had accepted, was still accepting, the subordination of black people in what we claimed was a democratic society. Our government threw Japanese families into concentration camps on the racist supposition that anyone Japanese – even if born in this country – could not be allowed to remain free.”

— Howard Zinn

197. “True, fascism was not to be tolerated by decent people. But neither was racism or colonialism or slave labor camps – one or another of which was a characteristic of all of the Allied powers.”

— Howard Zinn

198. “Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth, like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you – Ye are many, they are few!”

— Howard Zinn

199. “Women struggled to enter the all-male professional schools. Dr. Harriot Hunt, a woman physician who began to practice in 1835, was twice refused admission to Harvard Medical School. But she carried on her practice, mostly among women and children. She believed strongly in diet, exercise, hygiene, and mental health. She organized a Ladies Physiological Society in 1843 where she gave monthly talks. She remained single, defying convention here too.”

— Howard Zinn

200. “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. Certainly this was the experience of African-Americans in this country for two hundred years. With the government failing to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, black men, women, and children decided to do that on their own.”

— Howard Zinn