Howard Zinn Quotes


Sometimes it’s a short step from banning to burning.


Context

The “burning” is a reference to the range of murders from the burning of heretics in the Middle Ages to the crematorium ovens of the German Concentration Camps in the Holocaust of WWII.


Citations

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010, Historian, Interview, January 10, 2001

Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations

Related Quotes

This is another of Heine’s predictions of Nazi Germany. The book burning was followed by the Holocaust. See {622242}.


This became a critically important quotation a half century after it was made. Judge Hand articulated the majority Western and Judeo-Christian value proposition between dissent and heresy. However, for the majority of the Islamic world, the reverse represents the majority value that is held. There is a minority in the West that agrees that avoidance of heresy is paramount and a minority of the Muslim world that agrees that the protection of dissent is the more important value, but the two civilizations were at odds in the 20th and 21st centuries. However, Islam is about 600 years younger than Christianity. 600 years ago, the Christian world agreed with the Muslim society and prevention of heresy was the more important value. The Reformation and the enlightenment followed by the world example of America produced a transformation and this may occur in the majority of the Islamic world in time.


Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn
  • Born: August 24, 1922
  • Died: January 27, 2010
  • Nationality: American
  • Profession: Historian

Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010) was an American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist thinker and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote over 20 books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States in 1980. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, A Young People's History of the United States.