Howard Zinn Quotes

Howard Dean has been successful because he was clear in his opposition to the war. People appreciate a politician with the courage to say, I oppose this war.

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

I don't like war. I particularly don't like the celebration of war, which I think the administration is a little bit guilty of.

It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it's always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.

I've had this underlying need to go to a place and meet people who are on the other end of the portion of my tax money that goes to fund the U.S. and other militaries.

If it is right to honor those who served in the cause of war, then it is equally right to honor those who served the cause of resistance to war.

The whole thing stamps the President (Theodore Roosevelt) as unreliable, a faker, and a humbug. For years he has indulged in lofty sentiments, and violates them all for the sake of satisfying his petty spite.... Thank God, he can't fool all the people all the time, and this country is fast awakening to the real character of this bloody hero of Kettle Hill.

I have never met anyone who wasn't against war. Even Hitler and Mussolini were, according to themselves.

You're bombing that little piss-ant country up there [Vietnam], and you think you can blow them up. You've been doing this all the time. It's a bunch of crap about wanting to negotiate.

People talk, talk, but when it's time to fight me, they all wanna hug me.

We held signs that said 'Thank God For Dead Soldiers,' 'Thank God For IEDs.'

War is a barbaric tool of the war profiteers and Empires who employ them. War pits young people from the working class against other similarly poor, or disadvantaged humans, for nothing but the greed of the few. Only we the people can make war obsolete by not participating in the profound crimes of the profiteers and other war mongers.

The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would distrust a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.

I say openly that I am an anti-war person, with the point being, show me some reason not to be against this war. You have to be sort of asleep at the switch not to be critical of it. And the parallel between one quagmire we went through in Vietnam and the one we're in now is clear for everybody to see.

There is no way to avoid the reality that the American government in the past years has been the most spectacularly hypocrisy-driven government in the world. We rival the Soviet Union in some stages, in some ways, in hypocrisy.

I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

I get called "ISIS" now. Why don't we have a name-and-shame weapons dealership website? Instead, we're like, "Oh my God, are you really talking about the refugees again, making yourself into a caricature?" And it's like, "Until you stop the person in your country who's making billions of dollars from selling weapons, yeah, I have to talk about refugees." Whatever I say will get twisted or messed with.

Go to a nearby military cemetery and look at the American flags stuck on each grave and think of the person buried there who was killed for global domination or for the blunders and egomania of our leadership. And remember, for every person buried there, 10 more loved that person and were shattered by the loss. Instead of saluting, softly say: 'I'm sorry.' ... We need to make Memorial Day a relic of the past.

Our resistance to this war should be our resistance to profit at the cost of human life. Because that is what these drums beating over Iraq are really about. This is about business.

Is it not enough to make me come back to life out of spite, to have someone who spat in my face while I existed come and rub my feet when I am beginning to exist no longer?

I found Mr. Carter's actions toward the Republic of China so incredible that they defy description by socially acceptable expletives. If December 7, 1941 was a "day of infamy" then December 15, 1978 ranks right up there in international betrayal...The pathetic thing about this whole mess, however, is that it is typical of this administration's conduct of foreign affairs, which could be kindly described as being riddled by ineptitude and hypocrisy.

Being anti-war in Hollywood was an act of bravery on the order of the keynote speaker at a PLO dinner making jokes about Ariel Sharon.

For this mortal I would disobey my queen, abandon my king, the court that has protected me all these years. All of it.

In our road through life we may happen to meet with a man casting a stone reverentially to enlarge the cairn of another which stone he has carried in his bosom to sling against that very other's head.