Howard Zinn Quotes

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

There are literally billions of people on the planet who live in an unimaginable poverty that's not in any way different from the plight of the people in Orchid. And you can't have the splendor of Rodeo Drive without the sweatshops of Indonesia; those two things go hand in hand.

The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.

Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.

At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor, and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause.

The man who has his millions will want everything he can lay his hands on and then raise his voice against the poor devil who wants ten cents more a day.

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

The real threat to the democracy is the half a nation in poverty.

One must denounce the economic, financial, and social mechanisms and structures that are manipulated by the rich and powerful for their own benefit at the expense of the poor

We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.

The wealthiest in this country have never had it so good. They want more, and more, and more, and more, and they don’t care how many children they have to step on to get it..

The Alliance for Progress is an alliance between one millionaire and many beggars.

Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solution to large collective problems, because those problems [to the have’s] no longer seem very collective. Inequality undermines democracy/

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

The possession of wealth does not confer upon the wealthy the right to take advantage of the less fortunate.

Over time, economic benefits are accrued to the stronger, shrewder people in society, and if unrestrained by government, conditions would lead to economic autocracy and political despotism.

As long as inequality and other social problems plague us, populists will try to exploit them.

The rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another.

The concentration of wealth in the hands of the few threatens the ability of ordinary people to raise their voices and have a say over how our societies are run.

Ordinary people understand that the rich and powerful bully the poor and meek.

God, how patient are Thy poor! These corporations and masters of manipulation in finance heaping up great fortunes by a system of legalized extortion, and then exacting from the contributors-to whom a little means so much-a double share to guard the treasure!

Poverty is curable, but it’s just not done, because it's not profitable. And that is the kind of violence that's perpetuated on humanity.

There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy.

Let the gulled fool the toil of war pursue, where bleed the many to enrich the few.

Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent—as strong, as talented, as inteligent in every way—to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.