A Quote by Howard Zinn

The only hope lies in the fact that the American people - like people everywhere - are basically decent people with common sense.

Howard Zinn

Quote Topics

American American People Basically Common Common Sense Decent Everywhere Fact Hope Lies Like Only People Sense

Quote Author

Howard Zinn
American - Historian
August 24, 1922 - January 27, 2010

One expects decent people to stand up for the good of all. Decent people shut their doors and hide behind them as decent people do. Massacres could never happen if it weren't for decent people.

Jennifer Donnelly

That it is not the people who really feel that way, but it is people who have the most money to fire up these propaganda campaigns, these like, basically these lies that they are willing to lie to the public in order to manipulate them into doing what they want. And to me it doesn't make any sense.

Margaret Cho

Another option, which I think is the thing that makes more sense, is this fact that the police are a reflection of the occupation of certain neighborhoods and certain parts of cities that are designed, basically, to keep the bottom down and basically maintain the status quo, but out of sight, so that the other side - the people in power, the people with money, the people with comfort, the people that are living in the "safer" areas - are sure that they can sleep safely in their bed while bad thing are happening to people and it's not their problem.

Oren Moverman

Tom Paine was a great American visionary. His book, Common Sense, sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in a population of four or five million. That means it was a best seller for years. People were thoughtful then. Hope is one thing. But you need to have hope with thought.

Studs Terkel

North Carolinians are hard-working common-sense, decent and stubbornly independent people.

Cal Cunningham

One of the most important virtues of the American character is our ability to approach the complexities that life presents us with common sense and decency, .. The considered judgment of the American people is not going to rise or fall on the fine distinctions of a legal argument but on straight talk and the truth. It is time for the president and the Congress to follow that common sense for the good of the country.

Dick Gephardt

People are crying out for a Conservative Party that is decent, reasonable, common sense and in it for the long term of this country.

David Cameron

I'm good at my job for a midwestern American. Maybe it's because people in fashion often mistake common sense for genius. I mean, some model walks down the runway in an impossible outfit, and I state the obvious ? no one is going to wear that ? and people are like, you're brilliant!.

David Wolfe

I have seen that the American Dream is a reality - and I would love to feel the British Dream is also a reality. To enable that, we have to bring back some common sense and encourage family values, a proper sense of justice and make people believe they have a decent chance to build a business or career for themselves. I see this moment as a fantastic opportunity to restore this, because I believe Britain Has Talent.

Simon Cowell

Though the Americans can be fooled, as they have been, and they can be propagandized, as they have been... But, as Lincoln said, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And so hope lies in the fact that little by little, even if the American people can be fooled, even if they continue to be fooled in the 2004 presidential election, they will gradually learn, as they have learned - for instance, in the Vietnam War and turned against the Vietnam War.

Howard Zinn

The theory of probabilities is basically only common sense reduced to a calculus. It makes one estimate accurately what right-minded people feel by a sort of instinct, often without being able to give a reason for it.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Climate change is not just another issue. It is the issue that, unchecked, will swamp all other issues. The only hope lies in all the countries of the world coming together around a common global project to rewire the world with clean energy. This is a path to peace -- peace among people, and peace between people and nature.

Ross Gelbspan

It seems that in almost all societies, the attitudes that people have to language change is basically the same. People everywhere tend to say that the older form of a language is in some sense 'better' than the form that is being used today.

Terry Crowley

The unemployment rate today for people with our-year college degrees is 4.1%, which is almost none. That's people switching jobs basically. That tells you that education is the only way up and the only way out. If that is the fact, then we've got to get more of it for more people.

Thomas Friedman

There's the fact that American fiction is basically the most apolitical fiction on the globe. A South American writer wouldn't dare think of writing a novel if it didn't allude to the system into which these people are orchestrated - or an Eastern European writer, or a Russian writer, or a Chinese writer. Only American writers are able to imagine that the government and the corporations - all of it - seem to have no effect whatsoever.