Top 280 Howard Zinn Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “From time to time, whites were involved in the slave resistance. As early as 1663, indentured white servants and black slaves in Gloucester County, Virginia, formed a conspiracy to rebel and gain their freedom.”

— Howard Zinn

202. “It is no longer simply the merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the employing class, that is exploiting the world: it is the nation, a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor.”

— Howard Zinn

203. “I wonder now 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. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.”

— Howard Zinn

204. “All you have to do, gentlemen, for you have the numbers, is to unite on one idea – that the workingmen shall rule the country. What man makes, belongs to him, and the workingman made this country.”

— Howard Zinn

205. “If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive movements of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.”

— Howard Zinn

206. “By the end of the Clinton years, the United States had more than 2 million people in prison – a higher percentage of the population than any other country in the world, except maybe Communist China. Visions.”

— Howard Zinn

207. “Now, with the British out of the way, the Americans could begin the inexorable process of pushing the Indians off their lands, killing them if they resisted. In short, as Francis Jennings puts it, the white Americans were fighting against British imperial control in the East, and for their own imperialism in the West. Before.”

— Howard Zinn

208. “Free white workers were better off than slaves or servants, but they still resented unfair treatment by the wealthier classes.”

— Howard Zinn

209. “Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over “inferior” races? The United States’ armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old.”

— Howard Zinn

210. “What was close at hand, visible, was that Communists were the leaders in organizing working people all over the country. They were the most daring, risking arrest and beatings to organize auto workers in Detroit, steel workers in Pittsburgh, textile workers in North Carolina, fur and leather workers in New York, longshoremen on the West Coast.”

— Howard Zinn

211. “They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among savior, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.”

— Howard Zinn

212. “I told of Henry David Thoreau’s decision to break the law in protest against our invasion of Mexico in 1846, and began to give a brief history of civil disobedience in the United States.”

— Howard Zinn

213. “King’s stress on love and nonviolence was powerfully effective in building a sympathetic following throughout the nation, among whites as well as blacks.”

— Howard Zinn

214. “At a certain point he startled me by saying, “You know, this is not a war against fascism. It’s a war for empire. England, the United States, the Soviet Union – they are all corrupt states, not morally concerned about Hitlerism, just wanting to run the world themselves. It’s an imperialist war.”

— Howard Zinn

215. “Any humane and reasonable person must conclude that if the ends, however desireable, are uncertain and the means are horrible and certain, these means must not be employed.”

— Howard Zinn

216. “We need to dig under the rubble of war and point out that the Bush administration is using the war as a cover for worsening the income gap in this country, while paying no attention to the problems of most of the American people, while enriching corporations.”

— Howard Zinn

217. “Indeed, in 1976, fifteen years after he arrived and was arrested, Charles Sherrod was elected to the Albany city commission.”

— Howard Zinn

218. “And still, even from the cells of the condemned, the message was going out: the class war was still on in that supposedly classless society, the United States.”

— Howard Zinn

219. “The president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense were lying to the American public – there was no evidence of any attack, and the American destroyers were not on “routine patrol” but on spying missions.”

— Howard Zinn

220. “Democrats and Republicans to elect Rutherford Hayes in 1877 set the tone. Whether Democrats or Republicans won, national policy would not change in any important way.”

— Howard Zinn

221. “When guns boom, the arts die.”

— Howard Zinn

222. “It has spread among skilled workers, white-collar workers, professionals; for the first time in the nation’s history, perhaps, both the lower classes and the middle classes, the prisoners and the guards, were disillusioned with the system.”

— Howard Zinn

223. “I lay back on my bunk and thought about people I love, and how lucky I was to be white and not poor and just passing briefly through a system which is a permanent hell for so many.”

— Howard Zinn

224. “In the question period someone asked, “Why did you write so harshly in Black Bourgeoisie?” His response brought laughter and applause from the audience: “My friend, white people have bamboozled us. Preachers have bamboozled us. Teachers have bamboozled us, and kept us all bamboozled. We need someone to debamboozle us!”

— Howard Zinn

225. “It seems quite clear that much of this intense activity for Progressive reform was intended to head off socialism. Easley talked of “the menace of Socialism as evidenced by its growth in the colleges, churches, newspapers.” In 1910, Victor Berger became the first member of the Socialist party elected to Congress; in 1911, seventy-three Socialist mayors were elected, and twelve hundred lesser officials in 340 cities and towns. The press spoke of “The Rising Tide of Socialism.”

— Howard Zinn

226. “The Church finally seeks to make complete idiots out of the mass and to make them forego the paradise on earth by promising a fictitious heaven.”

— Howard Zinn

227. “And the New York Journal of Commerce, half-playfully, half-seriously, wrote: “Let us go to war. The world has become stale and insipid, the ships ought all to be captured, and the cities battered down, and the world burned up, so that we can start again. There would be fun in that, Some interest, – something to talk about.”

— Howard Zinn

228. “Capital punishment could not be justified in any society calling itself civilized.”

— Howard Zinn

229. “The Tonkin incident – the supposed attack on American destroyers by North Vietnamese torpedo boats near the coast of Vietnam – became the excuse for the swift American escalation of the colonial war that the French had lost in 1954 and that the United States had taken over.”

— Howard Zinn

230. “Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important – it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.”

— Howard Zinn

231. “There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States.”

— Howard Zinn

232. “The ecological crisis in the world had become so obviously serious that Pope John Paul II felt the need to rebuke the wealthy classes of the industrialized nations for creating that crisis: “Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness, both individual and collective, are contrary to the order of creation.”

— Howard Zinn

233. “We must recognize that we cannot depend on the governments of the world to abolish war because they and the economic interests they represent benefit from war.”

— Howard Zinn

234. “Twenty-five years later, official segregation is finally gone. Unofficial segregation is being challenged on all fronts. But racism, poverty, and police brutality are still the intertwined realities of black life in the United States.”

— Howard Zinn

235. “In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantify of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.”

— Howard Zinn

236. “The President of the United States isn’t going to solve our problems. The problems are too big.”

— Howard Zinn

237. “And Bernice Johnson, who organized the Albany Freedom Singers and was expelled from Albany State College for her determined involvement in the movement.”

— Howard Zinn

238. “The FBI is supposed to investigate criminal activities, but, like the old Soviet secret police, it seems also to take note of gatherings and public statements where the government is criticized.”

— Howard Zinn

239. “The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation – all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate by the Constitution of the United States.”

— Howard Zinn

240. “The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

— Howard Zinn

241. “The human consequences of Reagan’s budget cuts went deep. For instance, Social Security disability benefits were terminated for 350,000 people. A war hero of Vietnam, Roy Benavidez, who had been presented with the Congressional Medal Of Honor by Reagan, ‘Was told by Social Security officials that the shrapnel pieces in his heart, arms, and leg did not prevent him from working. Appearing before a congressional committee, he denounced Reagan.”

— Howard Zinn

242. “In New York you could see the poor lying in the streets with the garbage. There were no sewers in the slums, and filthy water drained into yards and alleys, into the cellars where the poorest of the poor lived, bringing with it a typhoid epidemic in 1837, typhus in 1842. In the cholera epidemic of 1832, the rich fled the city; the poor stayed and died.”

— Howard Zinn

243. “It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings to death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern Western civilization, at the hands of slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and America, the countries deemed the most advanced in the world.”

— Howard Zinn

244. “So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.”

— Howard Zinn

245. “It was the job of education, he said, to smash through this make-believe and give black people a realistic picture of themselves and of the world.”

— Howard Zinn

246. “In Maryland, for instance, by the new constitution of 1776, to run for governor one had to own 5,000 pounds of property; to run for state senator, 1,000 pounds. Thus, 90 percent of the population were excluded from holding office.”

— Howard Zinn

247. “Again and again, Americans have voted for a president to keep them out of a war, only to see the “peace” candidate elected who then brings the nation into war.”

— Howard Zinn

248. “By 1850, fifteen Boston families called the “Associates” controlled 20 percent of the cotton spindleage in the United States, 39 percent of insurance capital in Massachusetts, 40 percent of banking resources in Boston.”

— Howard Zinn

249. “That day, throughout the nation, in towns and cities that had never seen an antiwar rally, several million people were protesting the war. It was the largest public demonstration in the nation’s history. On Moratorium Day I was racing from one antiwar rally to another, as so many others were, our voices hoarse by the end of the day.”

— Howard Zinn

250. “More important, there was a very painful thought in my head: those young Communists on the block were right! The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you.”

— Howard Zinn