Quotes from Howard Zinn

And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality.

The women tended the crops and took general charge of village affairs while the men were always hunting or fishing. And since they supplied the moccasins and food for warring expeditions, they had some control over military matters. As Gary B. Nash notes in his fascinating study of early America, Red, White, and Black: "Thus power was shared between the sexes and the European idea of male dominancy and female subordination in all things was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.

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

To make the country ours, before and after the American Revolution, we had to displace or annihilate the indigenous people who had lived here for thousands of years. We had expanded by using deception and force, by military forays into Florida to persuade Spain to "sell" that to us (no money changed hands), by invading Mexico and taking almost half its land.

Against the claims of a violent human nature there is enormous historical evidence that people, when free of a manufactured nationalist or religious hysteria, are more inclined to be compassionate than cruel. When citizens have an opportunity to learn of vicious acts committed by their own governments, they react with indignation and protest. So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.

Speaking of California, the Illinois State Register asked: Shall this garden of beauty be suffered to lie dormant in its wild and useless luxuriance? . . . myriads of enterprising Americans would flock to its rich and inviting prairies; the hum of Anglo-American industry would be heard in its valleys; cities would rise upon its plains and sea-coast, and the resources and wealth of the nation increased in an incalculable degree.

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.

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.

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.

cult of true womanhood" could not completely erase what was visible as evidence of woman's subordinate status: she could not vote, could not own property; when she did work, her wages were one-fourth to one-half what men earned in the same job. Women were excluded from the professions of law and medicine, from colleges, from the ministry.

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.

In spite of such preconceptions about blackness, in spite of special subordination of blacks in the Americas in the seventeenth century, there is evidence that where whites and blacks found themselves with common problems, common work, common enemy in their master, they behaved toward one another as equals. As one scholar of slavery, Kenneth Stampp, has put it, Negro and white servants of the seventeenth century were "remarkably unconcerned about the visible physical differences.

Our ethos is all that we currently hold to be true. It is what we act upon. It governs our manners, our business, and our politics.

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.

ATTENTION ANTI-RENTERS! AWAKE! AROUSE! . . . Strike till the last armed foe expires, Strike for your altars and your fires- Strike for the green graves of your sires, God and your happy homes!

We are here plunged in politics funnier than words can express. Very great issues are involved…. But the amusing thing is that no one talks about real interests. By common consent they agree to let these alone. We are afraid to discuss them. Instead of this the press is engaged in a most amusing dispute whether Mr. Cleveland had an illegitimate child and did or did not live with more than one mistress.

I never cared much for machinery. I could not see into their complications or feel interested in them. . . In sweet June weather I would lean far out of the window, and try not to hear the unceasing clash of sound inside.

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.

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

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.

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.

Artists in Times of War The Bomb Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves and the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem.

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.