You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train Quotes

“In 1992, teachers all over the country, by the thousands, were beginning to teach the Columbus story in new ways, to recognize that to Native Americans, Columbus and his men were not heroes, but marauders. The point being not just to revise our view of past events, but to be provoked to think about today.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions—poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed—which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“the media, like the politicians, do not take note of rebellion until it is too large to be ignored.”
― 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

“I lay back on my bunk and thought about people I love, and how lucky I was to be white and not poor and just passing briefly through a system which is a permanent hell for so many.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“The president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense were lying to the American public—there was no evidence of any attack, and the American destroyers were not on “routine patrol” but on spying missions.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“The most powerful reason given for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that they saved the lives of those who would have died in an invasion of Japan. But the official report of the Strategic Bombing Survey, which interrogated seven hundred Japanese officials right after the war, concluded that the Japanese were on the verge of surrender and would “certainly” have ended the war by December of 1945 even if the bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and even without an invasion of Japan. Furthermore, the United States, having broken the Japanese code, knew the Japanese were on the verge of surrender.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“The reward for participating in a movement for social justice is not the prospect of future victory. It is the exhilaration of standing together with other people, taking risks together, enjoying small triumphs and enduring disheartening setbacks—together.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“More important, there was a very painful thought in my head: those young Communists on the block were right! The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“In late April of 1971, several thousand antiwar veterans converged on Washington, to camp out, to lobby. As one of them said, “It’s the first time in this country’s history that the men who fought a war have come to Washington to demand its halt while the war is still going on.” In the final event of the veterans’ Washington encampment, a thousand of them, many in wheelchairs or on crutches, tossed their medals over a fence that the police had built around the Capitol steps to keep them away. As they did so, one by one, they made personal statements. One of them said, “I’m not proud of these medals. I’m not proud of what I did to receive them. I was in Vietnam for a year and … we never took one prisoner alive.” An Air Force man said that what he had done was a disservice to his country. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m now serving my country.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“We used military force to establish American power in Cuba and Puerto Rico, in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in Central America, in Hawaii and the Philippines.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“him. The government of the United States, he said, was willing to send armed forces halfway around the world for a cause which was incomprehensible, but it was unwilling to send marshals into Mississippi, though asked again and again, to protect civil rights workers from inevitable violence. And now three of them were dead.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“True, fascism was not to be tolerated by decent people. But neither was racism or colonialism or slave labor camps—one or another of which was a characteristic of all of the Allied powers.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“To make the country ours, before and after the American Revolution, we had to displace or annihilate the indigenous people who had lived here for thousands of years. We had expanded by using deception and force, by military forays into Florida to persuade Spain to “sell” that to us (no money changed hands), by invading Mexico and taking almost half its land.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“At a certain point he startled me by saying, “You know, this is not a war against fascism. It’s a war for empire. England, the United States, the Soviet Union—they are all corrupt states, not morally concerned about Hitlerism, just wanting to run the world themselves. It’s an imperialist war.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“Whenever I hear that the government must not get involved in helping people, that this must be left to “private enterprise,” I think of the G.I. Bill and its marvelous nonbureaucratic efficiency. There are certain necessities—housing, medical care, education—about which private enterprise gives not a hoot (supplying these to the poor is not profitable, and private enterprise won’t act without profit).”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“I remember my first reading of The Communist Manifesto, which Marx and Engels wrote when they too were young radicals; Marx was thirty, Engels twenty-eight. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” That was undeniably true, verifiable in any reading of history. Certainly true for the United States, despite all the promises of the Constitution (“We the people of the United States …” and “No state shall deny … the equal protection of the laws”).”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“Furthermore, some of the best people in the country were connected with the Communist movement in some way, heroes and heroines one could admire. There was Paul Robeson, the fabulous singer-actor-athlete whose magnificent voice could fill Madison Square Garden, crying out against racial injustice, against fascism. And literary figures (weren’t Theodore Dreiser and W. E. B. DuBois Communists?),”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“My image of “a Communist” was not a Soviet bureaucrat but my friend Leon’s father, a cabdriver who came home from work bruised and bloody one day, beaten up by his employer’s goons (yes, that word was soon part of my vocabulary) for trying to organize his fellow cabdrivers into a union.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“What was close at hand, visible, was that Communists were the leaders in organizing working people all over the country. They were the most daring, risking arrest and beatings to organize auto workers in Detroit, steel workers in Pittsburgh, textile workers in North Carolina, fur and leather workers in New York, longshoremen on the West Coast.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“I told of Henry David Thoreau’s decision to break the law in protest against our invasion of Mexico in 1846, and began to give a brief history of civil disobedience in the United States.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“I said, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern blacks did, as antiwar protesters did.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“The FBI is supposed to investigate criminal activities, but, like the old Soviet secret police, it seems also to take note of gatherings and public statements where the government is criticized.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“The expulsion of Spain from Cuba (a worthwhile venture) so that the U.S. could take control of Cuba (an unworthy venture) was preceded by a dubious story, never proven, that the Spaniards had exploded the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor. Our seizure of the Philippines (from the Filipinos) was preceded by a manufactured “incident” between Filipino and U.S. troops. The German sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania in World War I was one of the instances of “ruthless” submarine warfare given as a reason to enter that war; years afterward, it was disclosed that the Lusitania was not an innocent vessel but a munitions ship whose papers had been doctored.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“In the Mexican War, a skirmish between Mexican and American troops on the Texas-Mexico border led President Polk to state that “American blood has been shed on American soil,” and to ask Congress for war. Actually, the encounter took place in disputed territory, and Polk’s diary shows that he wanted an excuse for war so the United States could take from Mexico what the United States coveted, California and the whole Southwest.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“The Tonkin incident—the supposed attack on American destroyers by North Vietnamese torpedo boats near the coast of Vietnam—became the excuse for the swift American escalation of the colonial war that the French had lost in 1954 and that the United States had taken over.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“The hands of Hitler were filthy, but those of the United States were not clean. Our government had accepted, was still accepting, the subordination of black people in what we claimed was a democratic society. Our government threw Japanese families into concentration camps on the racist supposition that anyone Japanese—even if born in this country—could not be allowed to remain free.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“The evidence was powerful: the Allied powers—the United States, England, the Soviet Union—had not gone to war out of compassion for the victims of fascism. The United States and its allies did not make war on Japan when Japan was slaughtering the Chinese in Nanking, did not make war on Franco when he was destroying democracy in Spain, did not make war on Hitler when he was sending Jews and dissidents to concentration camps, did not even take steps during the war to save Jews from certain death. They went to war when their national power was threatened.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“So, we destroyed the German forces (twelve hundred Flying Fortresses bombing several thousand German soldiers!)—and also the French population of Royan. After the war, I read a dispatch by the New York Times correspondent in the area: “About 350 civilians, dazed or bruised … crawled from the ruins and said the air attacks had been ‘such hell as we never believed possible.’ ” At our bombing altitudes—twenty-five or thirty thousand feet—we saw no people, heard no screams, saw no blood, no torn limbs. I remember only seeing the canisters light up like matches flaring one by one on the ground below. Up there in the sky, I was just “doing my job”—the explanation throughout history of warriors committing atrocities.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“What the movement accomplished was historic, but soon it came up against obstacles far more formidable than the signs and badges of racial segregation. First, an economic system that, while lavishly rewarding some people and giving enough to others to gain their loyalty, consigns a substantial part of the population to misery, generation after generation. And along with this, a national ideology so historically soaked in racism that nonwhite people inevitably form the largest part of the permanent poor.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times