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If the gods had intended for people to vote, they would have given us candidates.

Howard Zinn

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Howard Zinn
Age: 87 †
Born: 1922
Born: August 24
Died: 2010
Died: January 27
Film Director
Historian
Historian Of The Modern Age
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Labor Historian
Pacifist
Peace Activist
Playwright
Brooklyn
New York
Gods
Vote
Given
Would
People
Intended
Candidates

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I have no regrets about my political activity, only that I sometimes got carried away with it and didn't find the right balance between obligations to my family and my need to be involved in social movements.
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There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
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Terrorism and war have something in common. They both involve the killing of innocent people to achieve what the killers believe is a good end.
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I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.
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Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.
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Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy it is absolutely essential to it.
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Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.
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War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.
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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.
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When we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress.
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What we have is a more sophisticated form of imperialism, which is economic. But lurking in the background, always ready to go, is an armed force.
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[W]e're taught that if one person kills another person, that is murder but if a government kills a hundred thousand persons, that is patriotism.
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[...] 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.
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If you join a fight for social justice you may win or lose, but just by being part of the struggle, you win, and your life will be better for it.
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In between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.
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Richard Nixon was not the lesser evil, he was the greater evil, but in his administration the war was finally brought to an end, because he had to deal with the power of the anti-war movement as well as the power of the Vietnamese movement. I will vote, but always with a caution that voting is not crucial, and organizing is the important thing.
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If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles.
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Will Iraq be a democracy? The question is, 'Will America be a democracy?'
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We must transfer our anger to the brutalities of our time.
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Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.
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