Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinnwas an American historian, playwright, and social activist. He was a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote more than twenty books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, A Young People′s History of the United States...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth24 August 1922
CountryUnited States of America
government profound people
There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the government of the United States.
pain inspiration reality
Through repeated practice of the body scan over time, we come to grasp the reality of our body as whole in the present moment. This feeling of wholeness can be experienced no matter what is wrong with your body. One part of your body, or many parts of your body, may be diseased or in pain or even missing, yet you can still cradle them in this experience of wholeness. - Jon Kabat
war issues rooms
When a nation issues ultimatums, it leaves no room for compromise and ensures that war will continue.
government beard united-states
Charles Beard warned us that governments-inc luding the government of the United States-are not neutral, that they represent the dominant economic interests, and that their Constitutions are intended to serve these interests.
yesterday born ifs
If you don't know history, it is as if you were born yesterday.
loyalty school patriotic
[...] There is none that disperses its control more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media - none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty.
compassion infinite defiance
The future is an infinite succession of presents.
country patriotism form
If what your country is doing seems to you practically and morally wrong, is dissent the highest form of patriotism?
government enemy important
Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.
powerful constitution-of-the-united-states paper
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.
may tyranny
Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.
jobs thinking people
And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
believe winning past
If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive movements of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
justice trying together
I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.