Howard Zinn Quotes

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

The greatest trick the rich - and their cheerleaders on the right - ever pulled was convincing the world that class didn't exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.

It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be.

If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.

You can't define what's middle class, what is wealthy, what is poor.

To be concerned about inequality is not engaging in class warfare.

The history of the Republican Party is marked by vacillation between its founding principle of opportunity and its domination by the wealthy elite.

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

I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back.

This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.

The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

They talk about class warfare -- the fact of the matter is there has been class warfare for the last thirty years. It's a handful of billionaires taking on the entire middle-class and working-class of this country. And the result is you now have in America the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth and the worst inequality in America since 1928. How could anybody defend the top 400 richest people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people?

The burning issue of our time is the growing inequality in income and wealth in our country, and it's got to be addressed. We've got to stop it. It's eroding our politics. It's separating our society into the haves and the have-nots. It's condemning a whole younger set of our population to not be able to enter the middle class. And, it hits hardest in the prairie areas of the United States, our small towns and communities, where the jobs just aren't available and the incomes are low.

We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say 'middle class,' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on.

The class war is over.

Choice dependent on wealth; those are the Tory words.

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

Texas has arguably the most extreme separation between the well off and everyday people in the United States.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.

If we're not going to tax the rich anymore, we're going to create class warfare.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.