Howard Zinn Quotes

I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other. I wanted my students to know that the accumulation of knowledge, while fascinating in itself, is not sufficient as long as so many people in the world have no opportunity to experience that fascination.

1876

But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.

2806

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

3775

Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.

2793

There is a power that can be created out of pent-up indignation, courage, and the inspiration of a common cause, and that if enough people put their minds and bodies into that cause, they can win. It is a phenomenon recorded again and against in the history of popular movements against injustice all over the world.

2385

That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made-you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.

4409

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

4452

Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

1716

Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.

4317

How can you have a war on terrorism while war itself is terrorism!

4959

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.

3669

A writer in early 1930, boosting the beauty business, started off a magazine article with the sentence: "The average American woman has sixteen square feet of skin.

1755

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

2471

We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children

4508

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.

4527

History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.

4048

Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.

2847

You can't be neutral on a moving train.

4063

The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.

4474

But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.

2381

The courtroom is one instance of the fact that while our society may be liberal and democratic in some large and vague sense, its moving parts, its smaller chambers-its classrooms, its workplaces, its corporate boardrooms, its jails, its military barracks-are flagrantly undemocratic, dominated by one commanding person or a tiny elite of power.

4888

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.

4797