97 Quotes by James W. Loewen

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

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.

It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christian.

When students are not asked to assess, but only to remember, they do not learn how to assess or how to think for themselves.

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.

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

When you see a roadside marker, take in what it tells but also ask, how might this be wrong? One giveaway is the use of qualifying phrases introducing statements of fact, as in: “According to tradition... ” or “According to the legislature... ” Visitors can count on the rest of such sentences to be unsubstantiated.

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.

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.