Howard Zinn Quotes

Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.

Peace is not passive, it is active. Peace is not appeasement, it is strength. Peace does not 'happen,' it requires work.

Because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total - but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.

All of us realize that war requires action. What is sometimes harder for us to realize is that peace and neutrality also require action.

It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.

War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate. . . . We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.

I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct.

At the beginning of this century, people never questioned the effectiveness of war, never thought there could be real peace. Now, people are tired of war and see it as ineffective in solving anything.

You can’t have peace without a war.

War's Legitimate Object Is More Perfect Peace.

We are living in a time of many wars. The call for peace must be shouted. Peace sometimes gives the impression of being quiet, but it is never quiet. Peace if always proactive and dynamic.

I want that there should be a belief, a faith in the possibility of removing mountains to the side of right. If we believe that war is wrong, as everyone must, then we ought to believe that by proper efforts on our part, it may be done away with.

Peace is the alternative to war, and nonviolence should be seen as the antidote to violence, not simply as its opposite. Nonviolence is more concerned with saving life than with saving face.

If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.

Whenever you have a possibility of going in two ways, either for peace or for war, for peaceful methods of for military methods, in the present age there is a strong prejudice for the peaceful ones. War seldom ever leads to good results.

No more war, war never again! Peace, it is peace which must guide the destinies of people and of all mankind.

They won't give peace a chance, that's just a dream some of us had

I hate the way war is seen as something inherently brutal and ugly. Yes, much of war brings out the worst part of our [people's] nature. But in war, all kinds of noble human traits have been developed, such as discipline, cohesion, pride.

We know how to win wars. We must learn now to win peace.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.

War is an act of force, and to the application of that force there is no limit. Each of the adversaries forces the hand of the other, and a reciprocal action results which in theory can have no limit.

It is not only war that can stop war but men of goodwill, conscious of their mission can deal with such deadly enemy.

We want to get rid of the militarist not simply because he hurts and kills, but because he is an intolerable thick-voiced blockhead who stands hectoring and blustering in our way of achievement.

People.. .love to say that 'Violence never solved anything.' But what solved Hitler? Was It a team of social workers? Was it putting daisies into the gun barrels of Nazi Panzer divisions? Was it a commission that tried to understand what made Hitler sorry? ?No. What solved Hitler was violence.

The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending.