Howard Zinn Quotes

When millions of people stand up and fight...they win.

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

Only force would produce social change.

It's about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen. It's not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them... 'Black Messiah' is not one man. It's a feeling that, collectively, we are all that leader.

I laid my hand on top of theirs, and all I could think was, Is this how revolutions begin? Not with a proclamation or a riot, but with a few people in a room somewhere with their hands clasped and a purpose.

I think we're at a time where people just want to join together and cause change. People don't want to live like this any more.

If the government or the parties won't address our needs, we will. It's about direct action, even civil disobedience.

When we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress.

I studied revolutions at university, and I think each revolution must begin with a moment of 'no.' If enough people have that moment at the same time, it becomes a movement.

Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.

And the spirit of revolution will not die while the hearts of these workers continue to beat.

The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.

There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.

Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.

All great movements are popular movements. They are the volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotions, stirred into activity by the ruthless Goddess of Distress or by the torch of the spoken word cast into the midst of the people.

No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... revolution is but thought carried into action.

Muslims and Christians can work together to depose dictators and assert the power of the people. We've seen it happen on the Tahrir Square in Cairo during the 2011 revolution in Egypt, with devout Muslims and Coptic Christians protesting side by side.

Fight the power that be. Fight the power.

We will not leave this place until our comrades are free. We are the power here. We are the power.

So we must stand together to resist, for we will get what we can take - just that and no more.

Wherever there is injustice, there is anger, and anger is like gasoline - if you spray it around and somebody lights a matchstick, you have an inferno. But anger inside an engine is powerful: it can drive us forward and can get us through dreadful moments and give us power. I learnt this with my discussions with nuclear policy makers.

We have a tendency to sugar coat the Civil Rights movement by showing arm in arm and everyone singing 'Kumbaya'. We don't really always show the resistance from the government, the resistance from the status quo, from the majority to silence the movement.

History dictates that unresponsive governments force ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence.