"There are other problems with the law. It’s a strange thing; we think that law brings order. Law doesn’t. How do we know that law does not bring order? Look around us. We live under the rules of law. Notice how much order we have? People say we have to worry about civil disobedience because it will lead to anarchy. Take a look at the present world in which the rule of law obtains. This is the closest to what is called anarchy in the popular mind — confusion, chaos, international banditry. The only order that is really worth anything does not come through the enforcement of law, it comes through the establishment of a society which is just and in which harmonious relationships are established and in which you need a minimum of regulation to create decent sets of arrangements among people. But the order based on law and on the force of law is the order of the totalitarian state, and it inevitably leads either to total injustice or to rebellion — eventually, in other words, to very great disorder."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Jews from the United StatesSocial activistsPlaywrights from the United StatesSocial anarchistsJewish socialists
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Quoted by Bill Moyers in What Would Howard Zinn Say?, (27 July 2017)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010) was an American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist thinker and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote over 20 books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States in 1980. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, A Young People's History of the United Stat
69 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Howard Zinn →
Related Quotes
"One of the judges in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial after World War II, Radhabinod Pal ... argued that the United States …"
"If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, nor as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but…"
"Khalil Bendib, with a few ingenious strokes of his pen, gets to the heart of the issues of our time. His cartoons are…"
"The First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights in the United States Constitution were being violated in Albany a…"
"At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, John Lewis, sp…"
"The white population could not possibly be unaffected by those events — some whites more stubborn in their defense of…"
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable."
"I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rat…"
"I am not an absolute pacifist, because I can't rule out the possibility that under some, carefully defined circumstan…"
"It is the great challenge of our time: How to achieve justice, with struggle, but without war."