Quotes About Society

Zinn is writing in response to the timeless questions that burn within anyone who cares about creating a more just society and world. Is change possible? Where will it come from? Can we actually make a difference? How do you remain hopeful?

From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two classes—paupers and millionaires….

Nations are not communities and never have been.

grievances of the lowest classes mingled with

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. . . .

Racism was becoming more and more practical.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the legal system had been reshaped to the advantage of men of commerce and industry at the expense of farmers, workers, consumers, and other less powerful groups within the society…. it actively promoted a legal redistribution of wealth against the weakest groups in the society.

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.

the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations...

During elections for the 1776 convention to frame a constitution for Pennsylvania, a Privates Committee urged voters to oppose "great and overgrown rich men … they will be too apt to be framing distinctions in society.

Youths are passed through schools that don't teach. Then forced to search for jobs that don't exist and finally left stranded to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.

Blacks were working as hard as they could to become a part of the system; I could not relate to their goals. These brothers still believed in making it in the world. They talked about it loud and long, expressing the desire for families, houses, cars, and so forth. Even at that time I did not want those things. I wanted freedom, and possessions meant nonfreedom to me.

Among her female friends, lesbians were particularly prominent: her closest friends in New York were Elsie de Wolfe and her partner, the theatrical agent Bessie Marbury, as well as Anne Morgan and her lover Ann Harriman Vanderbilt, and in Paris she was friendly with the lesbian novelist Natalie Barney and her circle. Lucy admired these independent, forthright women, and according to Randy Bryan Bigham, "a sexual ambiguity on Lucy's part is possible.

Typically, preachers in our work-oriented society teach that God rested to provide humanity with a precedent for rest, an example for our good. Seldom have I heard mention of the other meaning for rest, the one used in musical notation. This meaning refers to cessation rather than recovery from weariness. Our enjoyment of music owes much to these brief pauses.

Yet to read into the past the morality of our time (or the lack of it) may not make the historian's task any easier.

The first concern derived from the fact that the Mexica had

why as a society we are often so cruel or oblivious to the elderly. Why do we find it so easy to make jokes about them, or ignore them? Is it because we fear what they represent: our own ageing and approaching death?

And if you acknowledged cleanliness,oder, and the law, you also had to acknowledge the police.

Everything is functioning; only man himself is not any longer.

America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable

In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.

It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.

How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot - and it's only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid impotent fear. (In a letter dated 9-26-58)