Howard Zinn Quotes

Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.

I don't think that humankind is worthy of trust when we can't let go of war, draw borders between neighboring countries, seek to become richer than others, find joy in defeating others at sports, and choose someone of the opposite gender based on their appearance.

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography.

As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.

The idea that democracies never make war on each other rests on very thin historical ice.

The great questions of the day are not to be decided by speeches and majorities ... but by iron and blood.

We are equal in war but not in peace.

The elite interests must not crowd out the interests of the citizens.

Pacifism means letting the non-pacifists have control ... Pacifism will remain an ideal, war a fact. If the white races are resolved never to wage war again, the colored will act differently and become rulers of the world.

I do not mean to exclude altogether the idea of patriotism. I know it exists, and I know it has done much in the present contest. But I will venture to assert, that a great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest, or some reward.

If, on our own account, we do not intend to wage war, we are much less willing to do so for interests which do not concern Germany and are alien to it.

All nations want peace, but they want a peace that suits them.

Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war; only patriots and traitors.

Men appear to prefer ruining one another's fortunes, and cutting each other's throats about a few paltry villages, to extending the grand means of human happiness.

There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty - in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub - our immediate duty is to stop it.

I think nonviolence and the mediation of conflict by means of respecting civility must be promoted. But being the kind of beings we [peoplep] are - wrestling with greed, and wrestling with fears and security, anxieties, wrestling with hatred that's shot through all of us - wars are here to stay.

Democracy necessarily means a conflict of will and ideas, involving sometimes a war of the knife between different ideas.

We talk about spreading democracy and freedom all over the world, but they are to us words rather than conditions. We haven't even got them here in America, and the farther we get into this war the farther we get away from democracy and freedom. Where is it leading us to, and when will it end? The war might stop this winter, but that is improbable. It may go on for fifty years or more. That also is improbable. The elements are too conflicting and confused to form any accurate judgment of its length. There may be a series of wars, one after another, going on indefinitely.

I was only one woman alone, and had no power to move to action full-fed, sleek- coated, ease-loving, pleasure-seeking, well-paid,and well-placed countrymen in this war- trampled, dead, old land, each one afraid that he should be called upon to do something.

Unequal group rights, the politics of redistribution and a Constitution whose meaning varies with changeable coalitions are a recipe for civil war.