Howard Fast Quotes

I was born and grew up in the greatest, the noblest achievement of the human race on this planet - which was called the United States of America.

Most assuredly Zen is a religion, but it is a religion without scripture, without doctrine or dogma and without sin.

I suppose I have cause you grief and misery at times, but I have never intentionally caused you embarrassment and discomfort.

The revolution goes on; a man does not make the revolution, not a thousand men, not an army and not a party; the revolution comes from the people as they reach toward God, and a little of God is in each person and each will not forget it. This it is the revolution when slaves shake their chains and the revolution when a strong man bends toward a weaker and says, "Here, comrade, is my arm." The revolution goes on and nothing stops it; but because the people are seeking what is good, not what is wicked or powerful or cruel or rich or venal, but simply what is good
because of that the people flounder and feel along one dark road after another. The people no more all-seeing than their rulers once were; it is in intention that they differ.

Only people who suffer show the ravages of age.

I was in federal prison in West Virginia for three months for contempt of Congress for a refusing to comply with a request of a Congressional committee of Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Let us say that kindness costs me so little and rewards me well.

I am a man of peace [so he told Mother, but it always appeared to me that he was the most belligerent man of peace I had ever encountered]

I am a Zen Buddhist - but that is not to be thought of as a religion in

I'm disenchanted with Communism and most other things. I'm cynical but not a cynic. I'm cynical about TV, Congress, and commercial peanut butter.

After the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a group of us got together: a group of well-to-do people who were sympathetic to the lost cause of a Republican state. We bought a convent in Toulouse and converted it into a hospital run by the Unitarians. It took care of the Spanish refugees who fled to Toulouse.

Man is a part of God, or else he is a beast; and beasts know love and fear and hate and hunger
but not exultation

This experiment may fail, but if it succeeds it can be the most important event of our time
even more important and consequential than this war we have just fought. ( ... ) I had a wife and three children, and they were put to death because a nation of men turned into beasts. I watched that, and I could not have lived through it unless I believed, always, that what can turn into a beast can also turn into a man. We are neither. But if we go to create man, we must be humble. We are the tool, not the craftsman, and if we succeed, we will be less than the result of our work.

He found himself grinning at her. His nervousness had disappeared, and suddenly he had a sense of his own size, his physical strength, his own brains and being. Four years, he had earned his own bread and keep, fended for himself, had not only remained alive and well but had put together a small fishing fleet of his own, and kept it alive and functioning and fought the wind and the weather and met a payroll of eleven men in his crews-and be damned with the lot of them if he'd go into a funk over which spoon or knife to use.

It's been said that I am the most widely read writer of the 20th century. The number of books I've sold runs into untold millions.

The Rosenberg case had been orchestrated to an anti-Communist frenzy that matched the exuberant hysteria of the Nazi horror.

Politics, as he occasionally said, required three unchanging talents and
no virtues. More politicians, he claimed, had been destroyed by virtue than by any other cause; and the talents he enumerated in this fashion. The first talent was the ability to choose the winning side. Failing that, the second talent was the ability to extricate oneself from the losing side. And the third talent was never to make an enemy.

In the Congress of the United States, Cromwell had known a good many men who were possessed of absolute certainty, and this he feared so much that he felt the only real and enduring evil on the face of the earth was unbending certainty, unshakable orthodoxy.

A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion.

To be dogmatic about a cause you believe in at the age of 20 or 30 is not unusual. But to be dogmatic at age 55 or 60 shows a lack of any learning capacity.

You seem damn sure of yourself for a man your age?"
"I am as old as I can be at my age. I don't know very much, but I know the water.

When military men take over, honest men dance to the strings they pull.
Your life is no longer your own.

Will you keep this?" he asked, holding up the pendant. "Please. Don't show it to your folks. But keep it, please. I'm not asking for anything else. You're going away. God knows when I'll see you again. I can accept what you say about your feelings for me. I have to. But what harm will it do if you take this, and then at least, I'll know that something I got for you is with you.

Geronimo [is] ... an example of our practice of destroying those who oppose us and then honoring them.

When I kissed her, I felt that my heart would tear through my chest for excitement and wonder, and then I felt a good, empty sicknesss, if you can speak of anything in such contradictory terms.

My books were attacked constantly by the Communist Party for not hewing to the Party line. I have never hewed to a Party line of any kind.

The play is a marvelous form, but it demands less than a novel.

It wasn't that they were unpleasant people; indeed, they were the sweetest things ever; they just enjoyed melancholy and seemed to take heart and spirit from it.

And finally, be assured that Zen asks nothing even as it promises nothing. One can be a Protestant Zen Buddhist, a Catholic Zen Buddhist or a Jewish Zen Buddhist. Zen is a quiet thing. It listens.