Howard Zinn Quotes

The problem in this world is not civil disobedience...th e problem in this world is civil obedience.

When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find that far more, and far more hideous, crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.

To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right.

This is the greatest country under the sun. But we must not let our love of country, our patriotic loyalty, cause us to abate one whit in our protest against wrong and injustice.

As long as the superstition that people should obey unjust laws exists, so long will slavery exist

A time comes when silence is betrayal.

By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.

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.

They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders . . . . and millions have been killed because of this obedience . . . .

You are no Satyagrahi if you remain silent or passive spectators while your enemy is being done to death.

You can only watch injustice go on for so long until you're compelled to say something. To speak out against it.

Some laws are wrong, and we have an obligation to speak out against those laws wherever they are.

The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.

I abide where there is a fight against wrong.

Humans are insane. We kill our own people, starve our own people, sell them, work them to death, beat them, don't give them affordable/free/good healthcare, and let them live in misery, while a few of us have - we have all we want. We are evil.

I hate injustice, and I can't help but speak against it. But I don't want to get involved in politics.

Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

All tyranny, bigotry, aggression, and cruelty are wrong, and whenever we see it, we must never be silent.

Victorian values meant brutalizing people who were often poor.