“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.”
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, p. 270.
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.
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Howard Zinn 69
author and historian 1922–2010Related quotes
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 141.
2000s, 2006, State of the Union (January 2006)
Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 1 : The Frontiers of Nonsense
Reported in Didi Kirsten Tatlow, "A System Afraid of Its Own History", The New York Times (September 16, 2010).
Robert Lynd (1926) The orange tree: a volume of essays. p.60. The last sentence "Knowledge is power only if a man knows what facts not to bother about." was cited in some sources in the 1960s, such as August Kerber (1968) Quotable quotes on education. p.190, and in multiple other sources ever since.
