If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive movements of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare. Howard Zinn
About This Quote

In this quote, the words of James Baldwin can be taken to mean that history unfolds in a way that needs to be developed and over time. Some of the past is so old and so rigid that it becomes impossible to change it. However, if we can manage to let go of the past and accept the past as a series of possibilities, we may be able to create a better world for ourselves.

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary. - Oscar Wilde
  2. We have to allow ourselves to be loved by the people who really love us, the people who really matter. Too much of the time, we are blinded by our own pursuits of people to love us, people that don't even matter, while all that... - C. Joybell C.
  3. I wonder how many people don't get the one they want, but end up with the one they're supposed to be with. - Fannie Flagg
  4. That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable. - Deb Caletti
  5. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. - David Foster Wallace
More Quotes By Howard Zinn
  1. TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine...
  2. But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.
  3. The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities glimpsed in a reading of history different from the customary painful recounting of human cruelties. In such a reading we can find not only war but resistance to war, not...
  4. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
  5. Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?
Related Topics