Quotes from Howard Zinn

Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.

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.

We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is... to tell the truth.

I wonder 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.

The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.

The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.

Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals the fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such as world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.

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

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.

What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but "who is sitting in" -- and who is marching outside the White House, pushing for change.

You can't be neutral on a moving train.

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.

In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

Education can, and should be, dangerous.

Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.

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

One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.

The future is an infinite succession of presents.

If the gods had intended for people to vote, they would have given us candidates