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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.

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
Needs
Ordinary
Agitation
Things
Social
Distraction
Political
Prose
Also
Escape
Music
Welcome
Need
Serve
Sometimes
Mere
Important
Function

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There was something horrifying in the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call 'civilization,' we have carved up what we claim is one world into 200 artificially created entities we call 'nations' and armed to apprehend or kill anyone who crosses a boundary.
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In a two-party system, if both parties ignore public opinion, there is no place voters can turn.
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The cry of the poor is is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.
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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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Civil disobedience is not something outside the realm of democracy. Democracy requires civil disobedience. Without civil disobedience democracy does not exist.
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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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But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is... to tell the truth.
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What is called “apathy” is, I believe, a feeling of helplessness on the part of the ordinary citizen, a feeling of impotence in the face of enormous power. It’s not that people are apathetic they do care about what is going on, but don’t know what to do about it, so they do nothing, and appear to be indifferent.
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Sometimes it's a short step from banning to burning.
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War in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.
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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.
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I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.
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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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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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The violence of our time is caused by obedience.
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The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.
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Will Iraq be a democracy? The question is, 'Will America be a democracy?'
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There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the government of the United States.
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War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.
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People of the United States have to really consider whether they want to be an empire. Sweden is not worried about terrorism. New Zealand is not worried about terrorism. Holland is not worried about terrorism. Why not be a modest little country without all of these enormous ambitions?
Howard Zinn