Top 40 Iris Chang Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Whatever is not commonly seen is condemned as alien.”

— Iris Chang

2. “As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.”

— Iris Chang

3. “I don’t mind solitude. I love talking to other people, but I do need my space.”

— Iris Chang

4. “Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances.”

— Iris Chang

5. “When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day – but by the minute.”

— Iris Chang

6. “The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.”

— Iris Chang

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7. “They probably do have an Asian Barbie.”

— Iris Chang

8. “Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin – one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.”

— Iris Chang

9. “There are several important lessons to be learned from Nanking, and one is that civilization itself is tissue-thin.”

— Iris Chang

10. “Racial and ethnic tensions simmer just below the surface in virtually all multiethnic societies, but it usually takes an economic crisis to blow off the lid of civility and allow deep-seated hatred to degenerate into violence.”

— Iris Chang

11. “It’s much more difficult to work on a broad subject than on a specific one, because even if it’s hard to find the information, if you look hard enough for something specific you will find it, and you will discover things that you wouldn’t have thought of before.”

— Iris Chang

12. “The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.”

— Iris Chang

13. “Apparently some quirk in human nature allows even the most unspeakable acts of evil to become banal within minutes, provided only that they occur far enough away to pose no personal threat.”

— Iris Chang

14. “So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of “bestial machinery.”

— Iris Chang

15. “In Japan censorship is practiced not only by the government when it tampers with textbooks but by the media, which police themselves.”

— Iris Chang

16. “Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else.”

— Iris Chang

17. “Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it’s hard to find out when one slides into another.”

— Iris Chang

18. “There isn’t much in the way of pure communist spirit, because the whole nation seems to be engaged in capitalistic enterprises. Much of the country still operates under government control.”

— Iris Chang

19. “The suicide risk for mental health patients goes up during changes in medication.”

— Iris Chang

20. “For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people’s civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction.”

— Iris Chang

21. “When the Chinese first came to San Francisco, they were actually welcomed by the mayor and they had special ceremonies for them-again this is when their colony was very small, only a few Chinese.”

— Iris Chang

22. “I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.”

— Iris Chang

23. “Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.”

— Iris Chang

24. “I have to finish this book tour of almost 30 cities.”

— Iris Chang

25. “Its a wonderful thing to see a segment of our population that is open and eager to learn more about Chinese culture. It has filtered into the mainstream. You see credit-card ads on TV with white couples and Chinese babies.”

— Iris Chang

26. “Somebody who was born in this country who visited China would later face difficulty getting back in to the USA. We have to keep in mind that the struggles of the Chinese against these exclusion laws really laid down the foundations of civil rights law.”

— Iris Chang

27. “As economist Thomas Sowell has noted, middleman minorities typically arrive in their host countries with education, skills, or a set of propitious attitudes about work, such as business frugality and the willingness to take risks. Some slave away in lowly menial jobs to raise capital, then swiftly become merchants, retailers, labor contractors, and money-lenders. Their descendants usually thrive in the professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, or finance.”

— Iris Chang

28. “Some even tried to use opium to commit suicide, swallowing large doses as poison. Others turned to crime to support their addiction, causing a wave of banditry to sweep through Nanking. After making conditions ripe for banditry in Nanking, the Japanese used the epidemic of crimes to justify their occupation, preaching the need for imperial law and order.”

— Iris Chang

29. “Because they saw themselves as intellectuals rather than refugees, they were concerned less about preserving their Chinese heritage than with casting their lot with modern America, and eventual American citizenship. It is in connection with these immigrants, not surprisingly, that the term “model minority” first appeared. The term refers to an image of the Chinese as working hard, asking for little, and never complaining. It is a term that many Chinese now have mixed feelings about.”

— Iris Chang

30. “After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.”

— Iris Chang

31. “Often, what you see in the media is driven by economic forces.”

— Iris Chang

32. “If the conditions were right there could be great acceptance. Often it is only when they pose an economic or political threat that it turns really ugly.”

— Iris Chang

33. “It is very difficult to hang onto the relics of history.”

— Iris Chang

34. “There isn’t much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country?”

— Iris Chang

35. “I have certainly amassed many historical research gathering skills.”

— Iris Chang

36. “To a man who came from a military culture in which pilots were given swords instead of parachutes, and in which suicide was infinitely preferable to capture, it was incomprehensible that the Chinese would not fight an enemy to the death.”

— Iris Chang

37. “Back in 1943, Prince Mikasa Takahito, the youngest brother of Emperor Hirohito, spent a year as a staff officer at the Nanking headquarters of the Japanese Imperial Army’s expeditionary force in China, where he heard a young officer speak of using Chinese prisoners for live bayonet practice in order to train new recruits. “It helps them acquire guts,” the officer told the prince.”

— Iris Chang

38. “In a sixty-page report released in June 1938, Smythe concluded that the 120 air raids that Nanking experienced and the four-day siege of the city did only 1 percent of the damage inflicted by the Japanese army after it entered Nanking.”

— Iris Chang

39. “Ronald Takaki, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California at Berkeley, once called the Chinese and other Asian Americans “strangers from a different shore.” I propose to take this a step further. At various times in history, the Chinese Americans have been treated like strangers on both shores – a people regarded by two nations as too Chinese to be American, and too American to be Chinese.”

— Iris Chang

40. “This pervasive sense of danger has discouraged many serious scholars from visiting Japanese archives to conduct their research on the subject; indeed, I was told in Nanking that the People’s Republic of China rarely permits its scholars to journey to Japan for fear of jeopardizing their physical safety.”

— Iris Chang

41. “If you are struck by a bus, someone may steal your purse or wallet while you lie injured, but many more will come to your aid, trying to save your precious life. One person will call 911, and another will race down the street to alert a police officer on his or her beat. Someone else will take off his coat, fold it, and place it under your head, so that if these are indeed your last moments of life you will die in the small but real comfort of knowing that someone cared about you.”

— Iris Chang

42. “Weary of fire, weary of bombardment, and weary of siege, scattered groups of Chinese actually rushed out to welcome the Japanese invaders as they thundered into the city with their tanks, artillery, and trucks. Some people hung Japanese flags from their windows while others even cheered the Japanese columns as they marched through the south and west gates of the city.”

— Iris Chang

43. “He was not the only one; a total of seven Japanese class A war criminals, including Japanese Foreign Minister Hirota Koki, were judged guilty by the IMTFE and later hanged at the Sugamo Prison in Tokyo.”

— Iris Chang

44. “Unable to hold the line and under pressure, Tang complied. It was a decision that resulted in one of the worst disasters of Chinese military history.”

— Iris Chang

45. “One historian has estimated that if the dead from Nanking were to link hands, they would stretch from Nanking to the city of Hangchow, spanning a distance of some two hundred miles. Their blood would weigh twelve hundred tons, and their bodies would fill twenty-five hundred railroad cars. Stacked on top of each other, these bodies would reach the height of a seventy-four-story building.”

— Iris Chang