Quotes by Howard Zinn

About Howard Zinn:

Howard Zinn was an American historian, playwright, and social activist. He was a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote more than 20 books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, A Young People?s History of the United States.
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The argument that there are just wars often rests on the social system of the nation engaging in war. It is supposed that if a ‘liberal’ state is at war with a ‘totalitarian’ state, then the war is justified. The beneficent nature of a govern...

Howard Zinn

Today everybody is talking about the fact that we live in one world; because of globalization, we are all part of the same planet. They talk that way, but do they mean it? We should remind them that the words of the Declaration [of Independence] appl...

Howard Zinn

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

Howard Zinn

A writer in early 1930, boosting the beauty business, started off a magazine article with the sentence: "The average American woman has sixteen square feet of skin.

Howard Zinn

How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools...

Howard Zinn

Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is.

Howard Zinn

Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?

Howard Zinn

Some of the New York Radical Women shortly afterward formed WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and its members, dressed as witches, appeared suddenly on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. A leaflet put out by WITCH in...

Howard Zinn

My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conce...

Howard Zinn

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the...

Howard Zinn

Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.

Howard Zinn

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

Howard Zinn

What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor--inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing--permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. ...

Howard Zinn

The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a t...

Howard Zinn

The Constitution. . . illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The s...

Howard Zinn

And the New York Journal of Commerce, half-playfully, half-seriously, wrote: "Let us go to war. The world has become stale and insipid, the ships ought all to be captured, and the cities battered down, and the world burned up, so that we can start ag...

Howard Zinn

I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other. I wanted my students to know that the accumulation of knowledge, while fascinating in itself, is not sufficie...

Howard Zinn

Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.

Howard Zinn

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, a...

Howard Zinn

The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities glimpsed in a reading of history different from the customary painful recounting of human cruelties. In such a reading we can find not only war but re...

Howard Zinn

Author Bio

  • NameHoward Zinn
  • DescriptionAuthor and historian
  • BornAugust 24, 1922
  • DiedJanuary 27, 2010
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPlaywright; Political Scientist; Historian Of Modern Age; Historian; Writer