“As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.”
― Iris Chang, quote from The Rape of Nanking
“Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances.”
― Iris Chang, quote from The Rape of Nanking
“The Rape of Nanking did not penetrate the world consciousness in the same manner as the Holocaust or Hiroshima because the victims themselves had remained silent.”
― Iris Chang, quote from The Rape of Nanking
“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, quote from The Rape of Nanking
“The heroic efforts of the Americans and Europeans during this period are so numerous (their diaries run for thousands of pages) that it is impossible to narrate all of their deeds here.”
― Iris Chang, quote from The Rape of Nanking
“In 1996 I began an investigation into the life of John Rabe and eventually unearthed thousands of pages of diaries that he and other Nazis kept during the Rape. These diaries led me to conclude that John Rabe was “the Oskar Schindler of China.”
― Iris Chang, quote from The Rape of Nanking
“Perhaps the most fascinating character to emerge from the history of the Rape of Nanking is the German businessman John Rabe. To most of the Chinese in the city, he was a hero, “the living Buddha of Nanking,” the legendary head of the International Safety Zone who saved hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives.”
― Iris Chang, quote from The Rape of Nanking
“I think on the journey to finding the love we crave, the love we truly deserve, the first stop has to be the love we have for ourselves. That’s a love that can never be lost and can only grow and get stronger the more it is fostered and developed.”
― Jay Crownover, quote from Nash
“That anonymous coward is probably forty years old with raging BO and still living in his mum’s granny flat”
― Gabrielle Tozer, quote from The Intern
“A microscopic egg had failed to divide in time due to a failure somewhere along a chain of chemical events, a tiny disturbance in a cascade of protein reactions. A molecular event ballooned like an exploding universe, out onto the wider scale of human misery. No cruelty, nothing avenged, no ghost moving in mysterious ways. Merely a gene transcribed in error, an enzyme recipe skewed, a chemical bond severed. A process of natural wastage as indifferent as it was pointless. Which only brought into relief healthy, perfectly formed life, equally contingent, equally without purpose. Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“Let's not leave arguing."
"I'd rather not leave at all.”
― Liz Braswell, quote from A Whole New World
“I turn just as Aithinne leaps from a rock that juts out under the cliff. She lands with a soft thud, looking very pleased with herself. Her clothes are sopping wet, hair dripping, every inch of her covered in sand. And she doesn’t seem to mind one bit.
Aithinne makes her way across the larger beach rocks toward us, her movements graceful. “You both look miserable.”
“I’m cold and wet,” I say. “I feel wretched, and my blunderbuss is probably destroyed from the swim. No need to state the obvious.”
She glances at her brother. “And I suppose your face is just stuck that way?”
Kiaran pushes to his feet and I do the same. “What you see is the incessant, grave look of someone in possession of a sibling.”
“Ha ha.” Aithinne focuses her attention on me, tilting her head. “You know, I had a kyloe look at me exactly like that once. His hair was a similar color and everything.”
I glare at her. “You did not just compare me to a cow.”
“No, no. I compared your expression to one. Cows truly are majestic creatures, aren’t they”
― Elizabeth May, quote from The Vanishing Throne
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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