498 Quotes by Howard Zinn

In the summer of 1863, a “Song of the Conscripts” was circulated by the thousands in New York and other cities. One stanza: We’re coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more We leave our homes and firesides with bleeding hearts and sore Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to thy decree; We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase liberty.

The reward for participating in a movement for social justice is not the prospect of future victory. It is the exhilaration of standing together with other people, taking risks together, enjoying small triumphs and enduring disheartening setbacks – together.

That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made – you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.

This unequal treatment, this developing combination of contempt and oppression, feeling and action, which we call “racism” – was this the result of a “natural” antipathy of white against black? The question is important, not just as a matter of historical accuracy, but because any emphasis on “natural” racism lightens the responsibility of the social system. If racism can’t be shown to be natural, then it is the result of certain conditions, and we are impelled to eliminate those conditions.

It was the job of education, he said, to smash through this make-believe and give black people a realistic picture of themselves and of the world.

The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation – all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate by the Constitution of the United States.

The Church finally seeks to make complete idiots out of the mass and to make them forego the paradise on earth by promising a fictitious heaven.

Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war?

The essential ingredients of these struggles for justice are human beings who, if only for a moment, if only while beset with fears, step out of line and do “something”, however small. And even the smallest, most unheroic of acts adds to the store of kindling that may be ignited by some surprising circumstance into tumultuous change.