72 Quotes by Iris Chang

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.

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

Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.

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.

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

I don't mind solitude. I love talking to other people, but I do need my space.

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.

Whatever is not commonly seen is condemned as alien.

The worst... was what the Pakistani soldiers did to the Bengali women after their failed rebellion.