498 Quotes by Howard Zinn

All you have to do, gentlemen, for you have the numbers, is to unite on one idea – that the workingmen shall rule the country. What man makes, belongs to him, and the workingman made this country.

There is the past and its continuing horrors: violence, war, prejudices against those who are different, outrageous monopolization of the good earth’s wealth by a few, political power in the hands of liars and murderers, the building of prisons instead of schools, the poisoning of the press and the entire culture by money. It is easy to become discouraged observing this, especially since this is what the press and television insist that we look at, and nothing more.

Yes, we’re dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don’t want war. We don’t want capitalism. We want a decent society.

The establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain it’s control, kill us.

What was close at hand, visible, was that Communists were the leaders in organizing working people all over the country. They were the most daring, risking arrest and beatings to organize auto workers in Detroit, steel workers in Pittsburgh, textile workers in North Carolina, fur and leather workers in New York, longshoremen on the West Coast.

We have here a forecast of the long history of American politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes.

If there is going to be change, real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves. That’s how change happens.

The country therefore was not “born free” but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich.

You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” I would tell them. Some were baffled by the metaphor, especially if they took it literally and tried to dissect its meaning. Others immediately saw what I meant: that events are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that.