110+ Howard Zinn Quotes On Hope, Critical And Radical

Howard Zinn was an American Historian, playwright, and political activist. He is best known for his book A People's History of the United States, which provides a different perspective on American history from the traditional narrative. He was a professor at several universities and was a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Howard Zinn on hope, critical, radical.

Top 10 Howard Zinn Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is... to tell the truth.
4. There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
5. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.
6. They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.
7. Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.
8. The problem in this world is not civil disobedience...th e problem in this world is civil obedience.
9. Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.
10. George Orwell said, "Whoever controls the past controls the future," by which he meant that history is incredibly important in shaping the world view of the next generation of people.

Howard Zinn Image Quotes

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. — Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn Short Quotes

• How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?
• Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
• War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.
• Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.
• You can't be neutral on a moving train.
• One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.
• Most wars, after all, present themselves as humanitarian endeavors to help people.
• Diverse audiences can be just as misled as homogenous audiences.
• In a two-party system, if both parties ignore public opinion, there is no place voters can turn.
• It was an old lesson learned by governments: that war solves problems of control.

Howard Zinn Quotes About Hope

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. — Howard Zinn

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. — Howard Zinn

The future is an infinite succession of presents. — Howard Zinn

The only hope lies in the fact that the American people - like people everywhere - are basically decent people with common sense. — Howard Zinn

I can UNDERSTAND pessimism, but I don't BELIEVE in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical EVIDENCE. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give HOPE, because for hope we don't need certainty, only POSSIBILITY. — Howard Zinn

But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope. — Howard Zinn

My hope is that the memory of death and disgrace will be so intense that the people of the United States will be able to listen to a message that the rest of the world, sobered by wars without end, can also understand: that war itself is the enemy of the human race. — Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn Quotes About Society

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. — Howard Zinn

There is one central characteristic of anarchism on the matter of means, and that central principle is a principle of direct action - of not going through the forms that the society offers you, of representative government, of voting, of legislation, but directly taking power. — Howard Zinn

Yes, we're dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don't want war. We don't want capitalism. We want a decent society. — Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn Quotes About People

The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface. — Howard Zinn

The challenge remains. On the other side are formidable forces: money, political power, the major media. On our side are the people of the world and a power greater than money or weapons: the truth. — 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, are precious catalysts for change. — Howard Zinn

War is terrorism ... Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause. That's what terrorists are about. — Howard Zinn

I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president — which means, in our time, a dangerous president — unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction. — Howard Zinn

Behind the deceptive words designed to entice people into supporting violence -- words like democracy, freedom, self-defense, national security -- there is the reality of enormous wealth in the hands of a few, while billions of people in the world are hungry, sick, homeless. — Howard Zinn

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

The term 'just war' is 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

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. — Howard Zinn

People who have no respect for human life or for freedom or justice have taken over this beautiful country of ours. It will be up to the American people to take it back. — Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Howard Zinn

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. — Howard Zinn

Memorial Day will be celebrated ... by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments. — Howard Zinn

We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism.... — Howard Zinn

In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli. — Howard Zinn

What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but "who is sitting in" - and who is marching outside the White House, pushing for change. — Howard Zinn

Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane. — Howard Zinn

It's not right to respond to terrorism by terrorizing other people. And furthermore, it's not going to help. Then you might say, "Yes, it's terrorizing people, but it's worth doing because it will end terrorism." But how much common sense does it take to know that you cannot end terrorism by indiscriminately dropping bombs? — Howard Zinn

When we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress. — Howard Zinn

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. — Howard Zinn

Richard Nixon was not the lesser evil, he was the greater evil, but in his administration the war was finally brought to an end, because he had to deal with the power of the anti-war movement as well as the power of the Vietnamese movement. I will vote, but always with a caution that voting is not crucial, and organizing is the important thing. — Howard Zinn

Since war itself is the most extreme form of terrorism, a war on terrorism is profoundly self-contradictory. — Howard Zinn

There is a power that can be created out of pent-up indignation, courage, and the inspiration of a common cause, and that if enough people put their minds and bodies into that cause, they can win. It is a phenomenon recorded again and against in the history of popular movements against injustice all over the world. — Howard Zinn

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. — Howard Zinn

What most of us must be involved in--whether we teach or write, make films, write films, direct films, play music, act, whatever we do--has to not only make people feel good and inspired and at one with other people around them, but also has to educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world. — Howard Zinn

Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens. — Howard Zinn

What we have is a more sophisticated form of imperialism, which is economic. But lurking in the background, always ready to go, is an armed force. — Howard Zinn

When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won. — Howard Zinn

[Nationalism is] a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands. — Howard Zinn

One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression. Patriotism becomes the order of the day, and those who question the war are seen as traitors, to be silenced and imprisoned. — Howard Zinn

The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. — Howard Zinn

To ward off alienation and gloom, it is only necessary to remember the unremembered heroes of the past, and to look around us for the unnoticed heroes of the present. — Howard Zinn

The strike, the boycott, the refusal to serve, the ability to paralyze the functioning of a complex social structure-these remain potent weapons against the most fearsome state or corporate power. — Howard Zinn

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

I wonder how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. — Howard Zinn

The pretense in disputed elections is that the great conflict is between the two major parties. The reality is that there is a much bigger conflict that the two parties jointly wage against large numbers of Americans who are represented by neither party and against powerless millions around the world." (p. 65) — Howard Zinn

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. — Howard Zinn

While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control. — Howard Zinn

I was a bombadier in WW 2. When you are up 30,000 feet you do not hear the screams or smell the blood or see those without limbs or eyes. It was not til I read Hersey's Hiroshima that I realized what bomber pilots do. — Howard Zinn

It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity. — Howard Zinn

It's a strange thing, we think that law brings order. Law doesn't. How do we know that law does not bring order? Look around us. We live under the rule of law. Notice how much order we have? — Howard Zinn

Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act. — Howard Zinn

History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it. — Howard Zinn

The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of 'important', of course, depends on one's values. — Howard Zinn

I suggest that if you know history, then you might not be so easily fooled by the government when it tells you you must go to war for this or that reason -that history is a protective armor against being misled. — Howard Zinn

The rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and poverty in such calculated and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered. — Howard Zinn

Civil disobedience is not something outside the realm of democracy. Democracy requires civil disobedience. Without civil disobedience democracy does not exist. — Howard Zinn

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

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

And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners. — Howard Zinn

If you join a fight for social justice you may win or lose, but just by being part of the struggle, you win, and your life will be better for it. — Howard Zinn

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

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

If what your country is doing seems to you practically and morally wrong, is dissent the highest form of patriotism? — Howard Zinn

When [Ralph Waldo] Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, 'What are you doing in there?' it was reported that Thoreau replied, 'What are you doing out there?' — Howard Zinn

What is called “apathy” is, I believe, a feeling of helplessness on the part of the ordinary citizen, a feeling of impotence in the face of enormous power. It’s not that people are apathetic; they do care about what is going on, but don’t know what to do about it, so they do nothing, and appear to be indifferent. — Howard Zinn

Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely the path that is your life. - Jon Kabat — Howard Zinn

Let's face a historical truth: we have never had a "free market", we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with "big government" when it served their needs. — Howard Zinn

I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is. — Howard Zinn

I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. — Howard Zinn

Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a 'war on terrorism' is a contradiction in terms. — Howard Zinn

I am an anarchist, and according to anarchist principles nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization. — Howard Zinn

...Surely, we must renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed. — Howard Zinn

I believe that it is preferable sometimes to have one candidate rather another candidate, while you understand that that is not the solution. Sometimes the lesser evil is not so lesser, so you want to ignore that, and you either do not vote or vote for third party as a protest against the party system. — Howard Zinn

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

They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution and they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America. — Howard Zinn

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. — Howard Zinn

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

I'm worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they're doing. I'm concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that's handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers. — 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 sufficient as long as so many people in the world have no opportunity to experience that fascination. — Howard Zinn

When a nation issues ultimatums, it leaves no room for compromise and ensures that war will continue. — 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

Every word you utter to another human being has an effect, but you don't know it. If people begin to understand that change comes about as a result of a million tiny acts that seem totally insignificant, well then, they wouldn't hesitate to take those tiny acts. — Howard Zinn

The only way things will happen is if people get over the notion that they must see immediate success. If they get over that notion and persist, then they will see things happen before they even realize it. — Howard Zinn

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy. — Howard Zinn

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

When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant. — Howard Zinn

In between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities. — Howard Zinn

In war, good guys always become bad guys. — Howard Zinn

No doubt that anarchist ideas are frightening to those in power. People in power can tolerate liberal ideas. They can tolerate ideas that call for reforms, but they cannot tolerate the idea that there will be no state, no central authority. So it is very important for them to ridicule the idea of anarchism to create this impression of anarchism as violent and chaotic. It is useful for them. — Howard Zinn

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. — Howard Zinn

I had volunteered for the Air Force and was an enthusiastic bombardier. While dropping bombs on Europe, I generally didn't understand what I was doing. — Howard Zinn

Use the Day of Atonement not to pray for the dead but to act for the living, to rescue those about to die. — Howard Zinn

Emma Willard told the legislature that the education of women "has been too exclusively directed to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty" The problem, she said, was that "the taste of men, whatever it might happen to be, has made into a standard for the formation of the female character." Reason and religion teach us, she said, that "we too are primary existences...not the satellites of men. — Howard Zinn

There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the government of the United States. — Howard Zinn

Life Lessons by Howard Zinn

1. Howard Zinn taught us to be critical of the status quo, to challenge the power structures in place and to question the accepted narrative of history.
2. He encouraged us to think for ourselves and to never accept the injustices of the world without questioning them.
3. He showed us that it is possible to make a difference in the world and to strive for a more equitable and just society.