“The history of bombing—and no one has bombed more than this nation—is a history of endless atrocities, all calmly explained by deceptive and deadly language like 'accident', 'military target', and 'collateral damage'.”

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“Let's talk about socialism. I think it's very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name. Socialism had a good name... It had several million people reading socialist newspapers. Socialism basically said, hey, let's have a kinder, gentler society. Let's share things. Let's have an economic system that produces things not because they're profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism because you have to go beyond capitalism.”

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“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

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“If the gods had intended for people to vote, they would have given us candidates.”

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“When people don't understand that the government doesn't have their interests in mind, they're more susceptible to go to war.”

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“In such a world, 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 black did, as antiwar protesters did.”

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“How can you have a war on terrorism while war itself is terrorism! War itself is the enemy of the human race.”

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“The Greatest Generation? They tell me I am a member of the greatest generation. That's because I saw combat duty as a bombardier in World War II. But I refuse to celebrate "the greatest generation" because in so doing we are celebrating courage and sacrifice in the cause of war. And we are mis-educating the young to believe that military heroism is the noblest form of heroism, when it should be remembered only as the tragic accompaniment of horrendous policies driven by power and profit. The current infatuation with World War II prepares us—innocently on the part of some, deliberately on the part of others—for more war, more military adventures, more attempts to emulate the military heroes of the past.”

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“The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history… There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media—none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty.”

from A People's History of the United States​

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“If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles.”

from Writings on Disobedience and Democracy

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“The democratic principle, enunciated in the words of the Declaration of Independence, declared that government was secondary, that the people who established it were primary. Thus, the future of democracy depended on the people, and their growing consciousness of what was the decent way to relate to their fellow human beings all over the world.”

from A People's History of the United States​

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“in that growth of American capitalism—before and after the Civil War—whites as well as blacks were in some sense becoming slaves”

from A People's History of the United States​

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“histories of this country... suggest that in times of crisis we must look to someone to save us... teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors by going into a voting booth every 4 years to choose between two white and well-off males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.”

from A People's History of the United States​

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“The idea of saviors has been built into the entire culture. We have learned to look to stars, leaders, experts in every field, thus surrendering our own strength, demeaning our own ability, obliterating our own selves.”

from A People's History of the United States​

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“You call this progress, because you have motor cars and telephones and flying machines and a thousand potions to make you smell better? And people sleeping on the streets?”

from Marx in Soho

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“Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don't ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it”

from Marx in Soho

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“The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”

from A People's History of the United States​

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“Johnson vetoed bills to help Negroes; he made it easy for Confederate states to come back into the Union without guaranteeing equal rights to blacks... made the freed slaves like serfs, still working the plantations [with] labor contracts they could not break under penalty of prison... provided that the courts could assign black children to forced labor with punishment for runaways.”

from A People's History of the United States​

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“From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country—and failed... 7 million tons of bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, more than twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II—almost one 500-pound bomb for every human being in Vietnam... When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings—including the greatest antiwar movement in US history—and the human beings won.”

from A People's History of the United States​

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“There was some truth to the standard picture of the twenties as a time of prosperity and fun... Unemployment was down, the general level of wages for workers rose. Some farmers made a lot of money... But prosperity was concentrated at the top. One tenth of 1 percent of the families at the top received as much income as 42% of the families at the bottom”

from A People's History of the United States​

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“There were millions of tons of food around, but it was not profitable to transport it, to sell it. Warehouses were full of clothing, but people could not afford it. There were lots of houses, but they stayed empty because people couldn't pay the rent, had been evicted, and now lived in shacks in quickly formed 'Hooversvilles' built on garbage dumps.”

from A People's History of the United States​

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“When Kennedy took office in early 1961, he continued the policies of Truman and Eisenhower in SE Asia. Almost immediately, he approved a secret plan for various military actions in Vietnam and Laos.”

from A People's History of the United States​

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“The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in human history up to that time: 600,000 dead on both sides, in a population of 30 million—the equivalent, in the US of 1978, with a population of 250 million, of 5 million dead.”

from A People's History of the United States​

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“the United States was a democracy with certain liberties, while Germany was a dictatorship persecuting its Jewish minority, imprisoning dissidents, proclaiming the supremacy of the Nordic 'race'... However, blacks, looking at anti-Semitism in Germany, might not see their own situation int the U.S. as much different.”

from A People's History of the United States​

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