Howard Zinn Quotes

The laboring people should unite and should protect themselves against all idlers. You can divide mankind into two classes: the laborers and the idlers, the supporters and the supported, the honest and the dishonest. Every man is dishonest who lives upon the unpaid labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne. All laborers should be brothers.

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

Solidarity forever …. We stand outcast and starving from the wonders we have made.

The masses of the working-people of Scotland have read history, and are no revolutionary levelers.

To the workman we appeal by the memory and traditions of his own sufferings and wrongs to be vigilant to avoid the great guilt of inflicting upon his fellow-citizens the injustice from which he has himself escaped.

Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it threatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police.

Political economy regards the proletarian like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.

In modern capitalism economic exploitation rather than political oppression is the real enemy of the people.

The fact of the matter is that the U.S. is run by an unusually class-conscious, dedicated business class that has a very violent labor history, much worse than in Europe.

Exploitation is not exclusively capitalist, but wealth creation is.

Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.

In the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle. Among the whites in the United States, it is only the reactionary ruling circles that oppress the black people. They can in no way represent the workers, farmers, revolutionary intellectuals and other enlightened persons who comprise the overwhelming majority of the white people.

Only the Irish working class remains as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland.

There is no alternative to class struggle.

You're gonna have to keep on saying that - I am the proletariat, I am the people. I am not the pig. You've got to make a distinction.

I feel sympathy for the working class lad. I've always championed about ticket prices and try to equate that to people's salaries.

A social democratic party without deep roots in the working class movement would quickly fade into an unrepresentative intellectual sect.

The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.

It is impossible for capitalists and laborers to have common interests.

The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles.

Many workers already realize that the rule of the Socialist or Communist party will be only the concealed form of the rule of the bourgeois class in which the exploitation and suppression of the working class remains.

With the coming of peace, the workers are no longer needed as soldiers; they are no longer comrades, defenders of the fatherland, heroes. Once more they become beasts of burden, objects of exploitation.

In the class-struggle the conflict must always concern itself with immediate, practical objects

We need writers who will joyfully impose upon themselves the discipline of understanding and acting upon working-class-theory.

Be it Resolved, That we urgently call upon the wage earning class to arm itself in order to be able to put forth against their exploiters such an argument which alone can be effective: Violence.