Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
13 quotes
"The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
"That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored."
Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
"Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act."
Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
"I see this as the central issue of our time: how to find a substitute for war in human ingenuity, imagination, courage, sacrifice, patience...War is not inevitable, however persistent it is, however long a history it has in human affairs. It does not come out of some instinctive human need. It is manufactured by political leaders, who then must make a tremendous effort--by enticement, by propaganda, by coercion--to mobilize a normally reluctant population to go to war."
Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
"Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives."
Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
"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."
Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
"You can't be neutral on a moving train."
Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
"History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history--while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance--might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth."
Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
"Human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be confidently predicted from their past, that we are all creatures vulnerable to new thoughts, new attitudes.And while such vulnerability creates all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad, its very existence is exciting. It means that no human being should be written off, no change in thinking deemed impossible."
Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
"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, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
"The courtroom is one instance of the fact that while our society may be liberal and democratic in some large and vague sense, its moving parts, its smaller chambers--its classrooms, its workplaces, its corporate boardrooms, its jails, its military barracks--are flagrantly undemocratic, dominated by one commanding person or a tiny elite of power."
Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
"Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy."
Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
"I didn't want to spent a lot of close time with someone who believed that fun is a bourgeois indulgence."
Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times