"...the anti-apartheid movement in the '80s... he was there. ... He wasn't a detached academic who sort of wrote about these things but didn't put his heart where his mouth was. He put everything there, because he cared very deeply that these things were wrong -- that apartheid was wrong. Obviously. That's easy to say in retrospect. But, that was the early '80s, and there were people who didn't really think it was so bad. That's the thing. A lot of times we look back and we remember how radical it was to confront apartheid. Now, everyone looks back and knows it was wrong. It was so radical to oppose the Iraq war. Most of the public doesn't think we should have gone in. That's why dissent is so important, because it creates an atmosphere in which people can explore alternative ways of thinking. That's something I took from Howard. That's what Howard taught. That's why he still matters."
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
Nadine Dolby in What would Howard Zinn do? Teaching for Change (20 July 2013)
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."