Howard Zinn Quotes

It's also hard to believe, because people alive today, immigration's been a daily event and a daily topic for their whole lives. They can't conceive of a period of time where there was no immigration.

People, human beings with all their creative diversity, are the makers of history.

I would like to inspire a lot of people to be active and give back.

To make a revolution is not in the grain of our people's nature.

To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo.

Be not afraid , for all great power throughout the history of humanity has been with the people. From out of their ranks have come all the greatest geniuses of the world, and history can only repeat itself. Be not afraid of anything. You will do marvellous work.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

People don't get to change things. Things change people once in a while, but people don't change things.

I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and has grown a million times larger. And I cry because I am ashamed of how badly I have treated the people I love–of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages–back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to enter

The modification of prejudice takes a long time, and occurs as the result of a thousand things that happen to the prejudiced person - things he sees and hears and reads, people he talks to, and places he visits. Any given reformer must be content to take a small and obscure place in a chain of cumulative pressures.

People look at the future and see a black hole. They look at climate change and see an ecological crisis. They look at their leaders corrupted by money and see a political crisis. They wonder if they'll ever be able to pay off their student loan or own a house. Given this ecological, political and financial crisis, what they want is a different future. Their fundamental demand is a different regime to provide that future.

It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.

And if you were a very sophisticated con artist, what would you do to convince people that you were from the future? What benefits would that give you? For us, it's also a question of, "Is she or isn't she?" That's really a major part of the movie.

Plague has hung over human history. The biggest human extinction was after 1492 in North and South America when the mortality rate was 95 per cent, which is enormous. But again, I'm actually giving you grounds for optimism: There were enough to continue. The five per cent who made it through are what you need to survive a bottleneck, which we have been through before.

For the first time in human history, society has the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty

The movement is contagious, and the people in it are the ones who pass on the spirit.

We need to give people more of an incentive to work, to save, to invest, to create a true future for themselves.

For as long as I am alive, I will not rest in my desire to lead my people out of an abyss of corruption and poverty.

The real aim of music is to co-ordinate the minds of the people into an intelligent reach for a better world and an intelligent approach to the living future.

In the late '60s, people were saying we need power to, not power over. Power to do, accomplish, create, not power over other people.

I am trying to remember that things have certainly been crazier in human history and they may get crazier here and now, and [here I am trying to be optimistic] it's even a good thing, to be going through all of this, if only to be reminded that history hasn't stopped - human existence is as fundamentally unmanageable now as it ever was.

I feel that it's very important for young people to have a sense of history and do research and don't re-invent the wheel and don't think that you're the first martyr to discover social injustice but to take advantage of previous generations of activists and find out what they did and how they resolved things.

My mission is to communicate, to wake people up, just to give them my energy and accept theirs.

We do not know how we'd behave. But a lot of people facing fascism didn't become fascists. I don't happen to believe that we are all monsters.

We are a blessed people and, with God s guidance, our smiles might even become laughter in the not too distant future.