Top 280 Howard Zinn Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 6

251. “I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.”

— Howard Zinn

252. “I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president – which means, in our time, a dangerous president – unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.”

— Howard Zinn

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “Very soon after the Fourteenth Amendment became law, the Supreme Court began to demolish it as a protection for blacks, and to develop it as a protection for corporations.”

— Howard Zinn

257. “The rural Vietnamese was not regarded simply as a pawn in a power struggle but as the active element in the thrust. He was the thrust.”

— Howard Zinn

258. “Then Gregory lowered his voice, suddenly serious. “But it looks like we got to do it the hard way, and stay down here, and educate them.”

— Howard Zinn

259. “Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

— Howard Zinn

260. “Surely, if it is the right of the people to “alter or abolish,” it is their right to criticize, even severely, policies they believe destructive of the ends for which government has been established. This principle, in the Declaration of Independence, suggests that true patriotism lies in supporting the values the country is supposed to cherish: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. When our government compromises, undermines, or attacks those values, it is being unpatriotic.”

— Howard Zinn

261. “The leaders of early Boston were gentlemen of considerable wealth who, in association with the clergy, eagerly sought to preserve in America the social arrangements of the Mother Country.”

— Howard Zinn

262. “I didn’t want to spent a lot of close time with someone who believed that fun is a bourgeois indulgence.”

— Howard Zinn

263. “Slaves hung on determinedly to their selves, to their love of family, their wholeness. A shoemaker on the South Carolina Sea Islands expressed in his own way: “I’se lost an arm, but it hasn’t gone out of my brains.”

— Howard Zinn

264. “But however imperfect, even repugnant, were particular policies, particular actions, there remained the purity of the ideal, represented in the theories of Karl Marx and the noble visions of many lesser thinkers and writers.”

— Howard Zinn

265. “The very poor could not be counted on to support the government. They were like the slaves and Indians – invisible most of the time, but frightening to the elite if they started an uprising. Other citizens, though, might support the system. Farmers who owned their land, better-paid laborers, and urban office workers were paid just enough, and flattered just enough, that in a crisis they would be loyal to the system and the upper classes that dominated it. Big.”

— Howard Zinn

266. “And even the privileged minority – must it not reconsider, with that practicality which even privilege cannot abolish, the value of its privileges, when they become threatened by the anger of the sacrificed, whether in organized rebellion, unorganized riot, or simply those brutal individual acts of desperation labeled crimes by law and the state?”

— Howard Zinn

267. “The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit to build steel skyscrapers for insurance companies while the cities decay, to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing for children’s playgrounds, to give huge incomes to men who make dangerous or useless things, and very little to artists, musicians, writers, actors. Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.”

— Howard Zinn

268. “What black men, women, children did in Albany at that time was heroic. They overcame a century of passivity, and they did it without the help of the national government. They learned that despite the Constitution, despite the promises, despite the political rhetoric of the government, whatever they accomplished in the future would have to come from them.”

— Howard Zinn

269. “There have always been Southern whites who, at great risk, pioneered in the movement for racial justice. I was lucky to know some of them: Myles Horton, founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee; Carl and Anne Braden, editors of the Southern Courier in Louisville, Kentucky; Pat Watters and Margaret Long, journalists with the Atlanta Constitution; reporters Fred Powledge and Jack Nelson.”

— Howard Zinn

270. “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. This was not purely deception; it involved, in part, a genuine recognition of lower-class grievances, which helps to account for its effectiveness as a tactic over the centuries. As.”

— Howard Zinn

271. “It is pretended that, as in the Preamble to the Constitution, it is “we the people” who wrote that document, rather than fifty-five privileged white males whose class interest required a strong central government. That use of government for class purposes, to serve the needs of the wealthy and powerful, has continued throughout American history, down to the present day. It is disguised by language that suggests all of us – rich and poor and middle class – have a common interest.”

— Howard Zinn

272. “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.”

— Howard Zinn

273. “Everything in history, once it has happened, looks as if it had to happen exactly that way. We can’t imagine any other. But I am convinced of the uncertainty of history, of the possibility of surprise, of the importance of human action in changing what looks unchangeable.”

— Howard Zinn

274. “But opinion surveys in the 1980s and 1990s showed that Americans favored health care for everyone. They also were in favor of guaranteed jobs, government help for the poor and homeless, military budget cuts, and taxes on the rich. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats were willing to take these bold steps. What.”

— Howard Zinn

275. “I always emphasize the historic role of people of color in organizing and protesting to achieve justice.”

— Howard Zinn

276. “I believe is a common fallacy among intellectuals, that to say someone is “bright,” even “brilliant,” as was said of Silber, is equivalent to saying someone is good. Silber and I clashed almost immediately. What seemed to infuriate him was that I dared to criticize him publicly and unsparingly.”

— Howard Zinn

277. “The first large-scale revolt in the North American colonies took place in New York in 1712. In New York, slaves were 10 percent of the population, the highest proportion in the northern states, where economic conditions usually did not require large numbers of field slaves.”

— Howard Zinn

278. “The foreclosure of a 320-acre wheat farm in Springfield, Colorado, was interrupted by 200 angry farmers, who had to be dispersed by tear gas and Mace.”

— Howard Zinn

279. “But slave importation became illegal in 1808.”

— Howard Zinn

280. “For Indians there has never been a clear line between prose and poetry. When an Indian studying in New Mexico was praised for his poetry he said, “In my tribe we have no poets. Everyone talks in poetry.” There.”

— Howard Zinn

281. “Imagine the American people united for the first time in a movement for fundamental change. Imagine society’s power taken away from the giant corporations, the military, and the politicians who answer to corporate and military interests. We.”

— Howard Zinn

282. “In Wisconsin in 1856, the LaCrosse and Milwaukee Railroad got a million acres free by distributing about $900,000 in stocks and bonds to fifty-nine assemblymen, thirteen senators, the governor. Two years later the railroad was bankrupt and the bonds were worthless.”

— Howard Zinn

283. “In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.”

— Howard Zinn

284. “The United States builds weapons presumably secretly, and then it sells them to other countries. So the whole business of secrecy is kind of a fake issue because hardly anything technological remains a secret for very long.”

— Howard Zinn

285. “Just as African Americans had learned that they did not have enough strength to make good the promises of emancipation, working people learned that they were not united or strong enough to defeat the combination of private wealth and government power. But their fight would continue.”

— Howard Zinn

286. “More than half the colonists who came to the North American shores in the colonial period came as servants.”

— Howard Zinn

287. “The issues of free trade are complicated, but protestors asked a simple question: Should the health and freedom of ordinary people all over the world be sacrificed so that corporations can make a profit? Tens.”

— Howard Zinn

288. “It turned out to be the most bizarre election in the nation’s history. Al Gore received hundreds of thousands of votes more than Bush, but the Constitution required that the victor be determined by the electors of each state. The electoral vote was so close that the outcome was going to be determined by the electors of the state of Florida. This difference between popular vote and electoral vote had happened twice before, in 1876 and 1888.”

— Howard Zinn

289. “Surveying a series of news events in the first week of January 1983, David Nyhan of the Boston Globe wrote: “There is something brewing in the land that bodes ill for those in Washington who ignore it. People have moved from the frightened state to the angry stage and are acting out their frustrations in ways that will test the fabric of civil order.” He.”

— Howard Zinn

290. “Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.”

— Howard Zinn

291. “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. And granted, fascism was worse, admitting of no opening for change. But was war the answer? Was the only way to deal with fascism to engage in a bloodbath which left forty million people dead?”

— Howard Zinn

292. “But I was open to anything my students wanted to do, refusing to accept the idea that a teacher should confine his teaching to the classroom when so much was at stake outside it.”

— Howard Zinn

293. “As a schoolboy I had been taught to be proud of our nation’s march across the continent – it was always labeled “Westward Expansion.” Expansion – it seemed almost biological. We just grew.”

— Howard Zinn

294. “Noam and I had first met in the summer of 1965, on a plane ride to Mississippi with a delegation to protest the jailing of civil rights workers there. The antiwar movement brought us closer together, and Noam and his wife Carol, Roz, and I became friends. Of all the movement people I knew, there was no one person who combined such extraordinary intellectual power with such commitment to social justice.”

— Howard Zinn