Howard Zinn
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.Collection: Power
Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.Collection: Patriotism
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.Collection: War
One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.Collection: Freedom
War itself is the enemy of the human race.Collection: War
In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.Collection: Independence
There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
When people don't understand that the government doesn't have their interests in mind, they're more susceptible to go to war.
Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.
Most wars, after all, present themselves as humanitarian endeavors to help people.
If the gods had intended for people to vote, they would have given us candidates.
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.Collection: Inspirational
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 allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and 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.Collection: Inspirational
To be hopeful in bad times is based on the fact that human history is not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand Utopian future. 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.Collection: Hope
They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.Collection: Gun
But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power.Collection: People
Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.Collection: Peace
But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is... to tell the truth.Collection: Revolutionary
If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles.Collection: Loyalty
We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.Collection: Race
There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at critical points to create a power that governments cannot suppress.Collection: Government
Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.Collection: Inspirational
When I say history is a matter of life and death, I mean this: If you really don't know history, you are a victim of whatever the authorities tell you. You have no way of checking up on them. You have no way of deciding whether there is any truth in what they are saying.Collection: Mean
I do take the threat of terrorism seriously. You cannot eliminate that threat or diminish that threat by bombing a country.Collection: Country
I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.Collection: Powerful
Education can, and should be, dangerous.Collection: Should
Democracy depends on citizens being informed, and since our media, especially television (which is the most important source of news for most Americans) reports mostly what the people in power do, and repeats what the people in power say, the public is badly informed, and it means we cannot really say we have a functioning democracy.Collection: Mean
People should go where they are not supposed to go, say what they are not supposed to say, and stay when they are told to leave.Collection: People
Is not nationalism - that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder - one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking - cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on - have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.Collection: Religious
Are terrorists going to be deterred - are terrorists going to be scared if we react violently? No. They love it. That's what they dote on. They dote on violence. They dote on having more reasons to commit more terrorism.Collection: Violence
How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?Collection: War
Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.Collection: Meaningful
If there is going to be change, real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves. That's how change happens.Collection: Peace
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.Collection: Kindness
The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured.Collection: Catalyst For Change
The awful scenes of death and suffering we were witnessing on our television screens have been going on in other parts of the world for a long time, and only now can we begin to know what people have gone through, often as a result of our policies.Collection: Long
The mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction-so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements-that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission.Collection: Book
It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.Collection: Country
Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.Collection: Names
Through repeated practice of the body scan over time, we come to grasp the reality of our body as whole in the present moment. This feeling of wholeness can be experienced no matter what is wrong with your body. One part of your body, or many parts of your body, may be diseased or in pain or even missing, yet you can still cradle them in this experience of wholeness. - Jon KabatCollection: Pain
The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation--all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate by the Constitution of the United States.Collection: Powerful
Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it. It is a corrective to the sluggishness of "the proper channels," a way of breaking through passages blocked by tradition and prejudice. It is disruptive and troublesome, but it is a necessary disruption, a healthy troublesome.Collection: Law
We cannot be secure by limiting our liberties, as some of our political leaders are demanding, but only by expanding themWe should take our example not from the military and political leaders shouting 'retaliate' and 'war' but from the doctors and nurses and firemen and policemen who have been saving lives in the midst of mayhem, whose first thoughts are not violence, but healing, and not vengeance, but compassion.Collection: Military
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.Collection: Military
The resources of a university, of a college, should not be wasted in merely academic pursuits.Collection: College
It was an old lesson learned by governments: that war solves problems of control.Collection: War
I didn't want to spent a lot of close time with someone who believed that fun is a bourgeois indulgence.Collection: Fun
When a nation issues ultimatums, it leaves no room for compromise and ensures that war will continue.Collection: War
If you don't know history, it is as if you were born yesterday.Collection: Yesterday
What happened in World War II was what happened in war generally, and that was whatever the initiating cause, and however clear the moral reason is for the war in which one side looks better than the other, by the time the war ends both sides have been engaged in evil.Collection: War