Howard Zinn Quotes

In general our officers are humane. But in some cases they have carried on your warfare with a mixture of American ingenuity and Castilian cruelty.

I'm constantly not on the right side of history. I sympathize with the soldiers in the enemy's camp. For example in WWII, we know the Nazis and the Japanese were wrong. But I sympathize with the individual story of a soldier who was drafted into that.

We all are who we are. We're not necessarily good, and we're not necessarily bad. So much television, in the writing, is so one-dimensional, in that aspect, where you have your good guys and you have your bad guys.

We were living in a tumultuous time, when the world was upside down. Freeman produced a show that was black and white, the good guys versus the bad guys.

The older I get the more I realize there's no real good guys or real bad guys, and I'm curious about how the good guys got good and how the bad guys got bad.

You know, the best-laid plans of mice and men... I like playing bad guys, and I don't have a problem doing that. They're interesting characters, and there's as many different kinds of bad guys as there are good guys - they're rich, they're strong, they're powerful, and so that's fine with me.

The beauty of the characters on 'Justified' is that all the human beings that are written are all flawed. Even with the good guys, you see darkness surface.

The bad guys don't always get punished and the good guys are not necessarily pure.

I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and children. They were all classified as the same, and that's the classification that we dealt with over there, just as the enemy. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the order that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so.

I cannot think of any moral definition of anti-war that includes simply ignoring the slaughter of civilians.

The question of whether we should drop this new bomb on Japan involves such imponderable considerations as to remove it from the field of a military decision.

What’s the difference? Fill a hundred pits with dead Northmen, congratulations, have a parade! Kill one man in the same uniform as you? A crime. A murder. Worse than despicable. Are we not all men? All blood and bone and dreams?

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

I consider myself a fairly ethical individual while I do have a lot of dichotomies within me. We're all victims of our own hypocrisy at times.

In all good westerns, the good guy is always a little bit questionable because he kind-of has to make moral judgments.

I think goodness is very powerful, but often evil is made more attractive in films. It's a challenge to make goodness appealing.

The world must know that America holds to the highest standards of military conduct and human rights protections. Anything less is unacceptable.

History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.

The idea of goodies and baddies has always fascinated me, and what people consider to be a goodie or a baddie, because I've never seen any of my characters as baddies.

One to destroy, is murder by the law; and gibbets keep the lifted hand in awe; to murder thousands, takes a specious name, 'War's glorious art', and gives immortal fame.

The nice thing about 'Farscape' is that you got to be the good guy and still do the bad guy things.

There's good and bad in everybody. I wasn't looking for the good, or looking for the bad. This is a man who signed his pact with the devil 20 years ago, and he's learned to live with it. He's tried to protect his family from it.

The troops are therefore empowered and are in duty bound in this war to use without mitigation even against women and children any means that will lead to success.

Curious people who have become accustomed to think that one cannot sustain the moral of the army without giving it the freedom to shed blood from time to time.