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In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.

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
Today
Follows
Walls
Foreign
Independence
Wall
Schoolroom
Policy
Machiavelli
United
Hangs
States
Declaration

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Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.
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Behind the deceptive words designed to entice people into supporting violence -- words like democracy, freedom, self-defense, national security -- there is the reality of enormous wealth in the hands of a few, while billions of people in the world are hungry, sick, homeless.
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I don't think we can depend on Congress. In the American political system - we have been brought up to believe that the American political system works beautifully it is democratic Congress represents us the President is elected, he represents us - it doesn't work that way.
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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.
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Use the Day of Atonement not to pray for the dead but to act for the living, to rescue those about to die.
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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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To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
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When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant.
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We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.
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War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.
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Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.
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In between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.
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Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy it is absolutely essential to it.
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But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.
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George Orwell said, Whoever controls the past controls the future, by which he meant that history is incredibly important in shaping the world view of the next generation of people.
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Music can be a distraction and an escape. Sometimes a welcome escape. You need it. But music can also serve a very important social function because music can do things that mere prose, mere ordinary political agitation can't do.
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Is not nationalism - that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder - one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking - cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on - have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.
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If what your country is doing seems to you practically and morally wrong, is dissent the highest form of patriotism?
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I have come to believe that our lives can be turned in a different direction, our minds adopt a different way of thinking, by some significant, though small event. That belief can be frightening, or exhilarating, depending on whether you just contemplate it or do something with it.
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Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.
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