Latest Howard Zinn Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• The problem of giving health care to everybody cannot be solved so long as we're spending huge sums of money for war. Already we have a very wasteful healthcare system, the most wasteful healthcare system in the world. I mean, we spend the most money and still have 40 million people without insurance. Compare us to Cuba. Cuba is our enemy, run by a dictator, Fidel Castro. But people in Cuba get health care at least equal to that of the United States - with very scarce resources. So I think this issue is the most important domestic issue.

  Howard Zinn

  Running, War, Mean

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Though the Americans can be fooled, as they have been, and they can be propagandized, as they have been... But, as Lincoln said, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And so hope lies in the fact that little by little, even if the American people can be fooled, even if they continue to be fooled in the 2004 presidential election, they will gradually learn, as they have learned - for instance, in the Vietnam War and turned against the Vietnam War.

  Howard Zinn

  War, Lying, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The stories coming out of Iraq everyday - the violence, the chaos, the deaths of Americans, the deaths of Iraqis... Of course the deaths of Iraqis are not played up as much. But when they count the corpses they see women and children. We are constantly killing the people who are suspected of something. Now, in the United States or under any decent system of justice, you don't kill people on suspicion. That's what you do when you bomb a house because there are suspected leaders there. But we've been doing that again and again and the result has been a toll of thousands of civilians.

  Howard Zinn

  Children, People, Justice

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I did not feel very patriotic. I did not feel proud of our country, seeing that we were bombing peasant villages, that we were not just hitting military targets, that children were being killed. We were terrorizing the North Vietnamese with our enormous Air Force. They had no Air Force at all. They were a little pitiful country and we were terrorizing them with our bombs. And no, I did not feel proud at all.

  Howard Zinn

  Country, Children, Military

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Here's a president who gets 47 or 48 percent of the vote and takes 100 percent of the power, as if he had a mandate. He snuck into the presidency with the aid of political cronies, his father's having appointed members of the Supreme Court, his brother governor of Florida. And then he takes total control. And this is a president who seems to react to everything with force. Now we've had two wars. We've killed a lot of people. For anybody who is interested in not being a warlike nation anymore, and becoming a nation respected in the world, it becomes important to defeat Bush.

  Howard Zinn

  Brother, War, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I was just a seventeen-year-old kid, going to Times Square to participate in this left-wing demonstration. The signs were for peace and justice and so on. But then I was attacked by police mounted on horseback and on foot. Before I knew it, I was clubbed and knocked unconscious. So it gave me a radical view of the United States, a critical view of the role of the state and of the instruments of the state - the police, the Army, and so on - as not being neutral at all in political battles, but being generally against workers and against striking people, against dissenters of all kinds.

  Howard Zinn

  Kids, Army, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I began to think of war, even so-called "good wars" like World War II, as corrupting everybody. Violence begetting violence. The good guys beginning to act like the bad guys. And when I studied the history of wars, it seemed to me that that was the case. Athens vs. Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians presumably the democratic state. The Spartans the totalitarian state. But as the war went on, the Athenians began to act like the Spartans. They began committing atrocities and cruelties. So I saw this as a characteristic of war, even so-called "good wars."

  Howard Zinn

  War, Thinking, Guy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The film's title You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. comes from something I used to say in teaching my students "This is not going to be a neutral class." The world is already moving in certain directions and wars are going on and children are going hungry. Terrible things are happening. And so to be neutral in a situation like this is to collaborate with whatever is going on. And I don't want to collaborate with the world as it is. I want to intrude myself. I want to participate in changing the direction of things. So that's the origin of the title.

  Howard Zinn

  Children, War, Moving

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Right is not only to act within the law. It's to also act according to the conscience.

  Howard Zinn

  Law, Conscience

  Source: openvault.wgbh.org

• The violence of our time is caused by obedience.

  Howard Zinn

  Violence, Obedience, Our Time

  Source: openvault.wgbh.org

• Democracy depends on people speaking out, and in times of great crisis, on people creating a commotion.

  Howard Zinn

  Creating, People, Democracy

  Source: openvault.wgbh.org

• I don't think we can depend on Congress. In the American political system - we have been brought up to believe that the American political system works beautifully; it is democratic; Congress represents us; the President is elected, he represents us - it doesn't work that way.

  Howard Zinn

  Believe, Thinking, Political

  Source: openvault.wgbh.org

• Throughout American history, the political leaders have always exhorted the American people to be nice and quiet and leave things to them. But when very serious evils confronted the American people, they had to go beyond the Congressmen and Senators, and they had to commit civil disobedience and they had even to break the law.

  Howard Zinn

  Nice, Law, People

  Source: openvault.wgbh.org

• I do take the threat of terrorism seriously. You cannot eliminate that threat or diminish that threat by bombing a country.

  Howard Zinn

  Country, Terrorism, Threat

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The function of traditional history is to create a citizenry that looks to the top - the president, Congress, the Supreme Court - to make the important decisions. That's what traditional history is all about: the laws that were passed, the decisions made by the court. So much of history is built around "the great men." All of that is very anti-democratic.

  Howard Zinn

  Men, Law, Decision

• People of the United States have to really consider whether they want to be an empire. Sweden is not worried about terrorism. New Zealand is not worried about terrorism. Holland is not worried about terrorism. Why not be a modest little country without all of these enormous ambitions?

  Howard Zinn

  Country, Ambition, People

• We better rethink the position of the United States in the world and whether we want to be an empire. Being an empire puts all of us in jeopardy. The American Empire, while it was just wreaking havoc on other nations, didn't bother us.

  Howard Zinn

  United States, World, Want

  "Interview with Howard Zinn: A People’s History of the United States". Interview with Sean Carswell and Todd Taylor, razorcake.org. December 6, 2011.

• The Roman Empire came to an end, but the Roman people didn't come to an end, so I see the American Empire coming to an end just as other empires have come to an end.

  Howard Zinn

  People, Empires, Coming To An End

  "Interview with Howard Zinn: A People’s History of the United States". Interview with Sean Carswell and Todd Taylor, razorcake.org. October 18, 2001.

• 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

  Country, Issues, Long

  "Interview with Howard Zinn: A People’s History of the United States". Interview with Sean Carswell and Todd Taylor, razorcake.org. October 18, 2001.

• Even if you assume presidents were democratically elected they still have no right to keep secrets from the American people.

  Howard Zinn

  People, Secret, President

• That whole idea of threats to national security is a very interesting one. The phrase is very useful for the government to try to encompass the citizenry in the same box as the government is in. To say, "We're all in this together. It threatens all of us."

  Howard Zinn

  Government, Ideas, Interesting

• I would prefer to use a very inclusive definition of the working class. I'd like to include all of those people who are, if they're not exploited by an immediate employer over them, they're exploited by the system and therefore have a cause to want to change the system. Having a very inclusive definition of the working class creates a great opportunity for organizing people.

  Howard Zinn

  Opportunity, Class, People

• Music can be a distraction and an escape. Sometimes a welcome escape. You need it. But music can also serve a very important social function because music can do things that mere prose, mere ordinary political agitation can't do.

  Howard Zinn

  Political, Important, Agitation

  "Interview with Howard Zinn: A People’s History of the United States". Interview with Sean Carswell and Todd Taylor, razorcake.org. October 18, 2001.

• If you have an economic system in which there must be a lower class, there must be unemployed. There must be a large pool of people working at the worst jobs and the lowest paid jobs. Once you have a system like that, then the most likely people to be victims of that are people of color.

  Howard Zinn

  Jobs, Color, Class

  "Interview with Howard Zinn: A People’s History of the United States". Interview with Sean Carswell and Todd Taylor, razorcake.org. October 18, 2001.

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

  Howard Zinn

  Color, People, Justice

  Source: facpub.stjohns.edu