498 Quotes by Howard Zinn

Here was the traditional device by which those in charge of any social order mobilize and discipline a recalcitrant population – offering the adventure and rewards of military service to get poor people to fight for a cause they may not see clearly as their own.

In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.

From time to time, whites were involved in the slave resistance. As early as 1663, indentured white servants and black slaves in Gloucester County, Virginia, formed a conspiracy to rebel and gain their freedom.

Police, I learned over the years, are like soldiers, normally good-natured people, but part of a culture of obedience to orders and capable of brutal acts against anyone designated as “the enemy” – in this case, the antiwar movement.

I didn’t want to spent a lot of close time with someone who believed that fun is a bourgeois indulgence.

Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth, like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you – Ye are many, they are few!

The only hope lies in the fact that the American people – like people everywhere – are basically decent people with common sense.

If you want to end terrorism, you have to stop being terrorists.

Black civil rights activists in the South were among the first to resist the draft. SNCC’s Bob Moses joined historian Staughton Lynd and veteran pacifist Dave Dellinger to march in Washington against the war, and Life Magazine had a dramatic photo of the three of them walking abreast, being splattered with red paint by angry super-patriots.