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The meaning ... of a writer will be found not just in what he intends to say, or what he does literally say, but in the effect of his writing on living beings.

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
Living
Found
Intends
Doe
Literally
Writing
Effect
Beings
Meaning
Effects
Writer

More quotes by Howard Zinn

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People should go where they are not supposed to go, say what they are not supposed to say, and stay when they are told to leave.
Howard Zinn
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Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is.
Howard Zinn
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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.
Howard Zinn
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I am not an absolute pacifist, because I can't rule out the possibility that under some, carefully defined circumstances, some degree of violence may be justified, if it is focused directly at a great evil.
Howard Zinn
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When people don't understand that the government doesn't have their interests in mind, they're more susceptible to go to war.
Howard Zinn
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Throughout American history, the political leaders have always exhorted the American people to be nice and quiet and leave things to them. But when very serious evils confronted the American people, they had to go beyond the Congressmen and Senators, and they had to commit civil disobedience and they had even to break the law.
Howard Zinn
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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.
Howard Zinn
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[Nationalism is] a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands.
Howard Zinn
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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.
Howard Zinn
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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.
Howard Zinn
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These people—the employed, the somewhat privileged—are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.
Howard Zinn
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They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution and they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America.
Howard Zinn
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Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy it is absolutely essential to it. It is a corrective to the sluggishness of the proper channels, a way of breaking through passages blocked by tradition and prejudice. It is disruptive and troublesome, but it is a necessary disruption, a healthy troublesome.
Howard Zinn
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The fact that war belongs to the past, does not mean it has to be part of the future.
Howard Zinn
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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
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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.
Howard Zinn
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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
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They didn't give their lives for their country! their lives were taken from them by their government.
Howard Zinn
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Right is not only to act within the law. It's to also act according to the conscience.
Howard Zinn
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Even if you assume presidents were democratically elected they still have no right to keep secrets from the American people.
Howard Zinn