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The violence of our time is caused by obedience.

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
Caused
Obedience
Violence
Time

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War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.
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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.
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Will Iraq be a democracy? The question is, 'Will America be a democracy?'
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Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders . . . . and millions have been killed because of this obedience . . . .
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In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.
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The mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction-so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements-that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission.
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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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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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We must transfer our anger to the brutalities of our time.
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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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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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The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of 'important', of course, depends on one's values.
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Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.
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