Howard Zinn Quotes

War, we are told, shapes character; it resolves the major questions of international politics, consolidates nations, and indeed, constitutes the principal factor in the progress of civilization through its successive stages.

I live in Europe and care about democracy and sovereignty of nation states there.

It is not differences of opinion; it is geographical lines, rivers, and mountains which divide State from State, and make different nations of mankind.

President Obama, like every other leader on Earth, is still going to be looking out for national and economic interests. States don't cease to be states overnight just because they get a great visionary as their new president.

We do not covet one inch of Lebanese territory, and the basis for the peace treaty between our two countries will be the international border, which exists now, between Rosh Haniqra and Ras en Naqura.

Earlier ages fortified themselves behind the sovereign state, behind protectionism and militarism.

Hand in hand with nationalist economic isolationism, militarism struggles to maintain the sovereign state against the forward march of internationalism.

The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.

I hope in time N. H. as well as the other States will feel the importance of Sovereignty.

The Turkish army will have done its duty when it defends the country from foreign aggression and frees the nation from fanaticism and intellectual slavery. The Turkish nation has fallen far behind the West. The main aim should be to lead it to modern civilization.

Nations have lost their traditional exclusive jurisdiction over their treatment of their citizens.

The more globalized the world becomes, the less traumatic it is for nationalists to split from their states.

Are we going to permit uncontrolled nationalism to dominate civilized Europe…?

Patriotism, as the South understood it, meant devotion to one's State, and only a secondary and consequential devotion to the Union, existing as a result of the State's action in making itself a part of the Union, and terminable at any time by the State's withdrawal.

The "State" was substituted for humanity; cosmopolitan gave way to nationalism.

Nationalism is the most powerful force on earth today.

The organization of independent nations which has followed the disappearance of the Holy Roman Empire is in the main the outgrowth of that progress in civilization which leads peoples to seek the liberty of local self-government according to their own ideas.

The fight for ideals can no longer take the form of fight between nations, because the lines of division on moral questions are within the nations themselves and intersect the political frontiers.

The great question of the 20th century is whether the Anglo-Saxon of the Slav is to impress his civilization upon the world.

Anti-Western resentment and Russian patriotism appear particularly pronounced in Putin’s personality and life experiences, but a different Russian government not run by former KGB types would still be confronted with the challenge of weakness vis-à-vis the West and the desire for a special role in the world. Russia’s foreign policy orientation, in other words, is as much a condition as a choice. But if Russian elites could somehow redefine their sense of exceptionalism and put aside their unwinnable competition with the West, they could set their country on a less costly, more promising course.

The open borders position may sound new and radical, but it is simply a call for the return of lost liberties. When the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886, most of the world’s borders could be freely crossed without passports. Passport requirements had sometimes existed before and were still in place in backward Tsarist Russia, but the more liberal governments of advanced European nations regulated migration, as modern democracies regulate speech, only rather lightly and in exceptional cases, if at all. Comprehensive restrictions on international movement, which almost everyone today regards as a normal and necessary government function, are really an innovation of the twentieth century, which emerged as liberalism gave way to nationalism and socialism in the wake of World War I. Although the reasons for border control were The open borders position may sound new and radical, but it is simply a call for the return of lost liberties. When the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886, most of the world’s borders could be freely crossed without passports. Passport requirements had sometimes existed before and were still in place in backward tsarist Russia, but the more liberal governments of advanced European nations regulated migration, as modern democracies regulate speech, only rather lightly and in exceptional cases, if at all. Comprehensive restrictions on international movement, which almost everyone today regards as a normal and necessary government function, are really an innovation of the twentieth century, which emerged as liberalism gave way to nationalism and socialism in the wake of World War I. Although the reasons for border control were often explicitly racist—such as the national origins quotas of the 1924 U.S. Immigration Act—the restrictions were also motivated by bona fide national security concerns, as well as a desire to protect native wages and welfare states from immigrant competition and foreign dependents.

I feel that our attitude to our borders is wrong; it's the first time that an awful lot of people think you can and should just close your border and remain in this splendid isolation.

The elites have become international, and they've ceased to have a primary loyalty to the nation-state.

I think 2017 is going to be the year of the grand return of the nation-state, the control of borders and currencies.

The British people voted to take back control of our borders, trade, money and laws. They chose a bright future as a free, independent and sovereign country.