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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

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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
Keep
Presidents
Stills
Elected
Still
Secrets
Right
Assume
Even
Assuming
People
Secret
American
President
Democratically

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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.
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I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.
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Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.
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We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism....
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War in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.
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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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Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.
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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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Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?
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Crosses and gallows - that deadly historic juxtaposition.
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Will Iraq be a democracy? The question is, 'Will America be a democracy?'
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The only hope lies in the fact that the American people - like people everywhere - are basically decent people with common sense.
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The term 'just war' is an internal contradiction. War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is how to deal with evil, tyranny and oppression without killing huge numbers of people.
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It's not right to respond to terrorism by terrorizing other people. And furthermore, it's not going to help. Then you might say, Yes, it's terrorizing people, but it's worth doing because it will end terrorism. But how much common sense does it take to know that you cannot end terrorism by indiscriminately dropping bombs?
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If racism can't be shown to be natural then it is the result of certain conditions, and we are impelled to eliminate those conditions.
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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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The United States builds weapons presumably secretly, and then it sells them to other countries. So the whole business of secrecy is kind of a fake issue because hardly anything technological remains a secret for very long.
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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.
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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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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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