Howard Zinn: Trending quotes (page 3)

A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, p. 270.
Source: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
Context: 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. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magniﬁcently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. 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.

Thinking , Success , Future , Victory

“That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.”

Howard Zinn

Source: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

Life , Books , Way , Thinking

“When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant.”

Howard Zinn

War , Fight

“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 book A People's History of the United States

Source: A People's History of the United States

Law , Time

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

Howard Zinn

Source: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

Beauty

“But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.”

Howard Zinn

Source: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

Life , Justice , Law , Time

“At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream," was prepared to ask the right question: "Which side is the federal government on?" That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence, strange, considering how often this same government had been willing to intervene outside the country, often with overwhelming force.
John Lewis and SNCC had reason to be angry. John had been beaten bloody by a white mob in Montgomery as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but done nothing itself except to have FBI agents take notes. Instead of insisting that blacks and whites had a right to ride the buses together, the Kennedy Administration called for a "cooling-off period," a moratorium on Freedom Rides.”

Howard Zinn

You Can't Be Neutral on A Moving Train (1994) Ch. 4: "My Name is Freedom": Albany, Georgia

Dreams , Spring , Question , Freedom

“I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.”

Howard Zinn book A People's History of the United States

Source: A People's History of the United States (1980), Ch. 1

Hope , Past , Future

“The term "just war" contains an internal contradiction. War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is how to deal with evil, tyranny, and oppression without killing huge numbers of people.”

Howard Zinn

Terrorism and War (2002)

War , People , Evil , Time

“To white Americans of the thirties, however, blacks North and South were invisible. Only th radicals made an attempt to break the racial barriers: Socialists, Trotskyists, Communists most of all.”

Howard Zinn book A People's History of the United States

Source: A People's History of the United States (1980), Chapter 15

“If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, nor 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.”

Howard Zinn

Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (1991): "Obligation to the State" http://www.ecn.cz/temelin/textonly/state_zin.htm

Love , World , Justice , Democracy

“The First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights in the United States Constitution were being violated in Albany again and again — freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the equal protection of the laws — I could count at least 30 such violations. Yet the president, sworn to uphold the Constitution, and all the agencies of the United States government at his disposal, were nowhere to be seen.”

Howard Zinn

Describing the people who participated in the Freedom Rides to end segregation in Albany, Georgia. in You Can't Be Neutral on A Moving Train http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/oldzinn.htm (1994) Ch. 4: "My Name is Freedom": Albany, Georgia

Law , Freedom