Ring In the Zinntennial! Celebrating 100 Years of Howard Zinn
August 24, 2022
Who’s your favorite people’s historian, and why is it Howard Zinn? He’s ours, too, and today, August 24, he would have turned one hundred. He wore many hats: social activist, professor, author, and playwright. He meant so much to us here at Beacon Press. Going through the books we published of his, including his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, we get a little misty eyed. To celebrate his hundredth birthday, we pulled some beloved quotes that showcase his life’s worth of wisdom and insights on hope, the politics of writing history, the power of social movements, nonviolence, class, race, education, and much more. Which are your favorites?
And to keep the party going, we joined forces with the New Press, Haymarket Books, and Seven Stories Press to assemble an e-book featuring select writings of his that you can download for free. Enjoy!
3 Plays: The Political Theater of Howard Zinn (2010)
“Would writing for the theater be as satisfying, for someone like me, whose life and writing had been concentrated on war, law, poverty, injustice, racism? Thinking about it, I concluded that neither form of social struggle could be considered superior. Each had its unique power. Writing historical and political works, I could introduce to my readers ideas and facts that might provoke them to examine anew the world around them, and decide to join the fray. Writing plays would zoom in on a few characters, and by getting the viewers to identify with them emotionally, move the audience in a visceral way, something not easily achievable in prosaic works of history and political philosophy.”
~~~
“A play, like any other form of artistic expression (novels, poetry, music, painting), has the possibility of transcendence. It can, by an imaginative reconstruction of reality, transcend the conventional wisdom, transcend orthodoxy, transcend the word of the establishment, escape what is handed down by our culture, challenge the boundaries of race, class, religion, nation. Art dares to start from scratch, from the core of human need, from feelings that are not represented in what we call reality.”
The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace, editor (2002)
“We need new ways of thinking. A $300 billion military budget has not given us security. American military bases all over the world, our warships on every ocean, have not given us security. Land mines and a “missile defense shield” will not give us security. We need to rethink our position in the world. We need to stop sending weapons to countries that oppress other people or their own people. We need to be resolute in our decision that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.”
You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History (1994)
“Civil disobedience was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger, I argued, was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public’s acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it.”
~~~
“This mixing of activism and teaching, this insistence that education cannot be neutral on the crucial issues of our time, this movement back and forth from the classroom to the struggles outside by teachers who hope their students will do the same, has always frightened the guardians of traditional education. They prefer that education simply prepare the new generation to take its proper place in the old order, not to question that order.”
~~~
“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.”
~~~
“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.”
~~~
“I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other. I wanted my students to know that the accumulation of knowledge, while fascinating in itself, is not sufficient as long as so many people in the world have no opportunity to experience that fascination.”
~~~
“Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zig-zag towards a more decent society.”
~~~
“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
~~~
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.”
The Politics of History (1970)
“In a world where justice is maldistributed, historically and now, there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ or ‘representative’ recapitulation of the facts, any more than one is dealing ‘equally’ with a starving beggar and a millionaire by giving each a piece of bread. The condition of the recipient is crucial in determining whether the distribution is just.”
~~~
“In our time, as in the past, we construct ‘history’ on the basis of accounts left by the most articulate, the most privileged members of society. The result is a distorted picture of how people lived, an underestimation of poverty, a failure to portray vividly the situations of those in distress. If, in the past, we can manage to find the voice of the underdog, this may lead us to look for the lost pleas of our own era. True, we could accomplish this directly for the present without going back. But sometimes the disclosure of what is hidden in the past prompts us, particularly when there is no immediate prod, to look more penetratingly into contemporary society.”
~~~
“The more widespread is education in a society, the more mystification is required to conceal what is wrong; church, school, and the written word work together for that concealment. This is not the work of a conspiracy; the privileged of society are as much victims of the going mythology as the teachers, priests, and journalists who spread it. All simply do what comes naturally, and what comes naturally is to say what has always been said, to believe what has always been believed.”
~~~
“How to use the past to change the world, and yet not be encumbered by it—both skills can be sharpened by a judicious culling of past experience. But the delicate balance between them cannot come from historical data alone—only from a clearly focused vision of the human ends which history should serve.”
Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal (1967)
“The citizen’s job, I believe, is to declare firmly what he thinks is right. To compromise with politicians from the very start is to end with a compromise of a compromise. This weakens the moral force of a citizenry which has little enough strength in the shaping of governmental policy.”
SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964)
“All Americans owe [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] a debt for—if nothing else—releasing the idealism locked so long inside a nation that has not recently tasted the drama of social upheaval. And for making us look on the young people of the country with a new respect. Theirs was the silent generation until they spoke, the complacent generation until they marched and sang, the money-seeking generation until they renounced comfort and security to fight for justice in the dank and dangerous hamlets of the Black Belt.”
~~~
“It is just possible that the civil rights movement may lead us to re-examine our concern for ‘private’ property, and to redefine what is private and what is public.”
~~~
“It was not the Negro revolt that brought poverty to national attention. The statistics on unemployment, the conditions in Appalachia, the cries of distress from here and there, the studies of Michael Harrington and Leon Keyserling—these had their own impact, and ordinarily would bring some moderate economic reform, for such is the American tradition. What the civil rights movement has done is to bring into question whether perhaps we need a fundamental restructuring of the economic system in the United States, a change beyond Fair Deals and New Deals and other temporary aids.”
About Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a world-renowned historian, author, playwright, and social activist best known for A People’s History of the United States. His many highly acclaimed books include Three Strikes (with Dana Frank and Robin D. G. Kelley).