Top 100 James W. Loewen Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Between 1950 and 1970, the suburban population doubled from 36 million to 74 million as 83% of the nation’s population growth took place in the suburbs.”

— James W. Loewen

52. “By downplaying covert and illegal acts by the government, textbook authors narcotize students from thinking about such issues as the increasing dominance and secrecy of the executive branch. By taking the government’s side, textbooks encourage students to conclude that criticism is incompatible with citizenship.”

— James W. Loewen

53. “Ironically, societies characterized by a complex division of labor are often marked by inequality and support large specialized armies. Precisely these “civilized” societies are likely to resort to savage violence in their attempts to conquer “primitive” societies.22.”

— James W. Loewen

54. “Since “healthy communities are able to recognize past mistakes,” they went on to “pledge to work toward the common good in building a community where people of all races and cultural backgrounds are welcome to live and prosper.”

— James W. Loewen

55. “Columbus not only sent the first slaves acroiss the Atlantic, he sent more slaves than any other individual.”

— James W. Loewen

56. “To end our segregated neighborhoods and towns requires a leap of the imagination: Americans have to understand that white racism is still a problem in the United States. This isn’t always easy. Most white Americans do not see racism as a problem in their neighborhood. We need to know about sundown towns to know what to do about them.”

— James W. Loewen

57. “Rethinking Our Past: Recognizing Facts, Fiction, and Lies in American History Social Science in the Courtroom.”

— James W. Loewen

58. “Not understanding their past renders many Americans incapable of thinking effectively about our present and future.”

— James W. Loewen

59. “After the Fact, a book for college history majors in which they emphasize that history is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controversies.”

— James W. Loewen

60. “Since the alternatives to war remain roads largely not taken in the United States, however, they are tricky subjects for historians. As Edward Carr notes, “History is, by and large, a record of what people did, not what people failed to do.” On the other hand, making the present seem inevitable robs history of all its life and much of its meaning. History is contingent on the actions of people.”

— James W. Loewen

61. “A patriot is one who loves his homeland. A nationalist is one who scorns the homelands of others. – JOHANNES RAU.”

— James W. Loewen

62. “So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have played in exploration, from at least 6000 BC to the twentieth century, they encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge and intelligence. So long as they say “discover,” they imply that whites are the only people who really matter. So long as they simply celebrate Columbus, rather than teach both sides of his exploit, they encourage us to identify with white Western exploitation rather than study it.”

— James W. Loewen

63. “Thinking the day of judgment was imminent, farmers did not plant crops. Many people gave themselves over to alcohol. Civil and economic disruption may have caused as much death as the disease itself.”

— James W. Loewen

64. “By 1970, exclusion was so complete that fewer than 500 black families lived in white suburban neighborhoods in the entire Chicago metropolitan area, and most of those were in just five or six suburbs.”

— James W. Loewen

65. “Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. If you’ll pardon my grammar, nonwhite students do more worse in English and most worse in history.”

— James W. Loewen

66. “The first requirement of a slave society is secure borders. We do not like to think of the United States as a police state, a nation like East Germany that people had to escape from, but the slaveholding states were just that. Indeed, after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it easy for whites to kidnap and sell free blacks into slavery, thousands of free African Americans realized they could not be safe even in Northern states and fled to Canada, Mexico, and Haiti.”

— James W. Loewen

67. “Wilson was not only antiblack; he was also far and away our most nativist president, repeatedly questioning the loyalty of those he called “hyphenated Americans.” “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him,” said Wilson, “carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”27 The American people responded to Wilson’s.”

— James W. Loewen

68. “K-12 teachers. Many work in classrooms for as many as thirty-five hours a week; on top of that they must assign, read, and comment on homework, prepare and grade exams, and develop next week’s lesson plans.”

— James W. Loewen

69. “Could it be that we don’t want to think badly of Woodrow Wilson? We seem to feel that a person like Helen Keller can be an inspiration only so long as she remains uncontroversial, one-dimensional. We don’t want complicated icons. “People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions,” Helen Keller pointed out. “Conclusions are not always pleasant.”41 Most of us automatically shy away from conflict, and understandably so. We particularly seek to avoid conflict in the classroom.”

— James W. Loewen

70. “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. – ABRAHAM LINCOLN1.”

— James W. Loewen

71. “If members of the elite come to think that their privilege was historically justified and earned, it will be hard to persuade them to yield opportunity to others.”

— James W. Loewen

72. “Words are important – they can influence, and in some cases rationalize, policy.”

— James W. Loewen

73. “We jettisoned our medical practices of the 1780s while retaining the Constitution. But Native American medicinal practitioners who abandon their traditional ways to embrace pasteurization from France and antibiotics from England are seen as compromising their Indian-ness. We can alter our modes of transportation or housing while remaining “American”. Indians cannot and stay “Indian” in our eyes.”

— James W. Loewen

74. “The Truth can set us free.”

— James W. Loewen

75. “People have a right to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.”

— James W. Loewen

76. “Publishers or those who influence them have evidently concluded that what American society needs to stay strong is citizens who assent to its social structure and economic system without thought.”

— James W. Loewen

77. “The next successful Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, deliberately chose a citadel of white supremacy – the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi – as the kickoff site for his presidential campaign, where he declared his support for “states rights,” code words signaling that the federal government should leave local jurisdictions to handle the “race problem” as they see fit.”

— James W. Loewen

78. “These exuberant proclamations of equalitarianism in sundown towns exemplify not only base hypocrisy but also what sociologists call “herrenvolk democracy” – democracy for the master race. White Americans’ verbal commitment to nondiscrimination forms one horn of what Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal famously called “The American Dilemma.” Blatant racism forms the other horn. In elite sundown suburbs, this dilemma underlies what we shall later term the “paradox of exclusivity.”

— James W. Loewen

79. “Recovering the memory of the increasing oppression of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century can deepen our understanding of the role racism has played in our society and continues to play today.”

— James W. Loewen

80. “In Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama, interracial coalitions briefly won statewide and would have won more often had elections been fair. African Americans still had the rights of citizenship – at least formally – until the 1890s.”

— James W. Loewen

81. “It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit. Modifying one’s opinions to bring them into line with one’s actions or planned actions is the most common outcome of the process known as “cognitive dissonance,” according to social psychologist Leon Festinger. No one likes to think of himself or herself as a bad person. To treat badly another person whom we consider a reasonable human being creates a tension between act and attitude that demands resolution.”

— James W. Loewen

82. “Socially, segregation labeled African Americans as less than human; the term “boy” itself, applied to the Scottsboro defendants even as they became elderly, implied that they were less than men.”

— James W. Loewen

83. “White mobs killed African Americans across the United States. Some of these events, like the 1919 Chicago riot, are well-known. Others, such as the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from airplanes onto a black ghetto, killing more than seventy-five people and destroying more than eleven hundred homes, have completely vanished from our history books.”

— James W. Loewen

84. “It is not too much to say that the blacks in Georgia and the Carolinas made Sherman’s march possible. Their help meant that Sherman’s forces would not be traveling through hostile territory without supply lines. Rather, the soldiers were more like a huge guerilla force in friendly territory.”

— James W. Loewen

85. “For our first seventy years as a nation, then, slavery made our foreign policy more sympathetic with imperialism than with self-determination.”

— James W. Loewen

86. “On his first voyage, Columbus kidnapped some ten to twenty-five American Indians and took them back with him to Spain.55 Only seven or eight arrived alive, but along with the parrots, gold trinkets, and other exotica, they caused quite a stir in Seville. Ferdinand and Isabella provided Columbus with seventeen ships, twelve hundred to fifteen hundred men, cannons, crossbows, guns, cavalry, and attack dogs for a second voyage.”

— James W. Loewen

87. “On his first voyage, Columbus kidnapped some ten to twenty-five American Indians and took them back with him to Spain.55 Only seven or eight arrived alive, but along with the parrots, gold trinkets, and other exotica, they caused quite a stir in Seville.”

— James W. Loewen

88. “In fact, Wilson tried to strengthen the Espionage Act with a provision giving broad censorship powers directly to the president. Moreover, with Wilson’s approval, his postmaster general used his new censorship powers to suppress all mail that was socialist, anti-British, pro-Irish, or that in any other way might, in his view, have threatened the war effort.”

— James W. Loewen

89. “What is interesting about this choice is that Betsy Ross never did anything. Frisch notes that she played “no role whatsoever in the actual creation of any actual first flag.” Ross came to prominence around 1876, when some of her descendants, seeking to create a tourist attraction in Philadelphia, largely invented the myth of the first flag.”

— James W. Loewen

90. “Memory says, “I did that.” Pride replies, “I could not have done that.” Eventually, memory yields. – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE3.”

— James W. Loewen

91. “No book can convey the depths of the black experience without including material from the oppressed group. Yet not one textbook in my original sample let African Americans speak for themselves.”

— James W. Loewen

92. “Such titles differ from the titles of all other textbooks students read in high school or college. Chemistry books, for example, are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not Triumph of the Molecule.”

— James W. Loewen

93. “Coming into repeated contact with the same few others does not have the same consequences as meeting new people, either for human culture or for culturing microbes.”

— James W. Loewen

94. “To summarize, waves of ethnic cleansing swept across the United States between about 1890 and 1940, leaving thousands of sundown towns in their wake. Thousands of sundown suburbs formed even later, some as late as the 1960s. As recently as the 1970s, elite suburbs like Edina, Minnesota, would openly turn away Jewish and black would-be home buyers. Some towns and suburbs were still sundown when this book went to press in 2005.”

— James W. Loewen

95. “Garrett County is hardly colder than Detroit – hardly colder in 2002, for that matter, when I had the conversation, than it had been in 1890, when it had 185 African Americans. The fact that the very next county to the east had more than 1,000 African Americans, while Garrett County had at most one black household, is a dead giveaway. Such abrupt disparities can only result from different racial policies, not from factors such as climate.”

— James W. Loewen

96. “Mrs. Berch, who witnessed the shooting, said she thought she recognized the man who killed her husband, but authorities Tuesday said they had no clews as to the identify of the members of the mob. They were not masked.”

— James W. Loewen

97. “Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people’s curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. – ANATOLE FRANCE.”

— James W. Loewen

98. “When information which properly belongs to the public is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them, and – eventually – incapable of determining their own destinies. – RICHARD M. NIXON.”

— James W. Loewen

99. “One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over.”

— James W. Loewen

100. “The victors of the Civil War executed but one Confederate officeholder, Henry Wirz, notorious commandant of Andersonville prison, while the losers murdered hundreds of officeholders and other Unionists, white and black.”

— James W. Loewen