Quote

In a two-party system, if both parties ignore public opinion, there is no place voters can turn.

Howard Zinn

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Public
Party
Turns
Ignore
Place
Voters
Two
Parties
Turn
System
Opinion

More quotes by Howard Zinn

Image
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.
Howard Zinn
Image
Right is not only to act within the law. It's to also act according to the conscience.
Howard Zinn
Image
Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.
Howard Zinn
Image
Use the Day of Atonement not to pray for the dead but to act for the living, to rescue those about to die.
Howard Zinn
Image
One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.
Howard Zinn
Image
If what your country is doing seems to you practically and morally wrong, is dissent the highest form of patriotism?
Howard Zinn
Image
People who have no respect for human life or for freedom or justice have taken over this beautiful country of ours. It will be up to the American people to take it back.
Howard Zinn
Image
But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.
Howard Zinn
Image
The only hope lies in the fact that the American people - like people everywhere - are basically decent people with common sense.
Howard Zinn
Image
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.
Howard Zinn
Image
That whole idea of threats to national security is a very interesting one. The phrase is very useful for the government to try to encompass the citizenry in the same box as the government is in. To say, We're all in this together. It threatens all of us.
Howard Zinn
Image
Let's face a historical truth: we have never had a free market, we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with big government when it served their needs.
Howard Zinn
Image
The democratic principle, enunciated in the words of the Declaration of Independence, declared that government was secondary, that the people who established it were primary. Thus, the future of democracy depended on the people, and their growing consciousness of what was the decent way to relate to their fellow human beings all over the world.
Howard Zinn
Image
I believe that it is preferable sometimes to have one candidate rather another candidate, while you understand that that is not the solution. Sometimes the lesser evil is not so lesser, so you want to ignore that, and you either do not vote or vote for third party as a protest against the party system.
Howard Zinn
Image
In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.
Howard Zinn
Image
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.
Howard Zinn
Image
The future is an infinite succession of presents.
Howard Zinn
Image
Democracy depends on people speaking out, and in times of great crisis, on people creating a commotion.
Howard Zinn
Image
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.
Howard Zinn
Image
Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.
Howard Zinn