Quotes from The Rape of Nanking

Iris Chang ·  290 pages

Rating: (19K votes)


“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


About the author

Iris Chang
Born place: in Princeton, New Jersey, The United States
Born date March 28, 1968
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