Howard Zinn Quotes

The economic and technical capabilities of the established societies are sufficiently vast to allow for adjustments and concessions to the underdog.

We have to stop allowing economics to be used as a trump card. Capitalism is like math. It is amoral. It is good at producing wealth; it's bad at distributing wealth. Unless it operates within a moral framework it will produce an unjust society.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

Capitalism and democracy are the opposite of each other. Capitalism is a system that guarantees that a few are going to do very well, and everybody else is going to serve the few. Democracy means everybody has a seat at the table. Everybody.

It is because of capitalism that we can pay for services to poor people that we don't even know.

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth—not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced—to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.

The distribution of wealth ... depends on the laws and customs of society ... what the opinions and feelings of the ruling class make them, and are very different in different ages and countries; and might be still more different, if mankind so chose.

Prediction of whether or not the capitalist order will survive is, in part, a matter of terminology.

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

…empire follows the balance of property, whether lodged in one, a few, or many hands.

Those who control the wealth of this society have an influence over political life far in excess of their number.

The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.

The distribution of wealth, therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society.

The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire about his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits.

'The Deuce' takes a look at the remarkable paradigm of capitalism and labor: where money goes and how it's routed; who has power and who doesn't; who is exploited and who's not.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

The system has for its object an increase of persons that are to intervene between the producer and the consumer, living on the product of the land and labour of others, diminishing the power of the first, and increasing the number of the last.

Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation.

It is hard to redistribute wealth of there is no productive class producing it.

The social order we have built recognizes no exploitation of man by man. In our country there are no rich people to live at the expense of the workers and peasants. Just as there are no poor people living on the charity of others.

In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice.

People say law but they mean wealth.

Distinction in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions.

Keep up the middle class; lop off aristocracy on the one hand, and a rabble at the other; let the middle class ... have the power.

I think the defining issue of our time is: Does the economic, social, and political system work for the middle class?