James Loewen Quotes

#1. And James Loewen just proved that we all are wrong... this concept is fucking hard to be swallowed.

Deyth Banger

#2. Officially, of course, we're all to be treated the same, yes? But that is rarely put into practice.

Veronica Roth

#3. The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.

James W. Loewen

#4. People have a right to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. Evidence must be located, not created, and opinions not backed by evidence cannot be given much weight.

James W. Loewen

#5. There is a sun within every person.

Rumi

#6. What a community erects on its historical landscape not only sums up its view of the past but also influences its possible futures.

James W. Loewen

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. By idolizing those whom we honor, we do a disservice both to them and to ourselves ... We fail to recognize that we could go and do likewise. - CHARLES V. WILLIE

James W. Loewen

#10. In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi - but neither is it exceptionally less violent.

James W. Loewen

#11. Merely being part of the United States, without regard to our own acts and ideas, does not make us moral or immoral beings. History is more complicated than that.

James W. Loewen

#12. History is furious debate informed by evidence and reason.

James W. Loewen

#13. At this point the judge took over the questioning. "Didn't lynchings happen in Mississippi?" he asked. Yes, admitted the rating committee member, but it was all so long ago, why dwell on it now? "It is a history book, isn't it?" asked the judge.

James W. Loewen

#14. The difference between a moral person and a person of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, made out of weakness and tries to make amends with their life when they find the opportunity to say they are sorry is lost.

Shannon L. Alder

#15. Students will start finding history interesting when their teachers and textbooks stop lying to them.

James W. Loewen

#16. Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.

James W. Loewen

#17. History is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we got to this point.

James W. Loewen

#18. I think that it's important if you run for President that you have to make those important decisions. And your father, if he can help, probably, he helps just by being your father without getting intimately involved.

Birch Bayh

#19. I have never met a person in whom I did not see myself reflected.

Bob Brown

#20. Unfortunately, marketing textbooks is like marketing fishing lures: the point is to catch fishermen, not fish. Thus many adopted textbooks are flashy to catch the eye of adoption committees but dull when read by students.

James W. Loewen

#21. Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.

James W. Loewen

#22. Columbus not only sent the first slaves acroiss the Atlantic, he sent more slaves than any other individual

James W. Loewen

#23. Men are what they are because of what they do, not what they say.

Fredrik Backman

#24. We preach democracy while supporting dictatorships.

James W. Loewen

#25. 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

#26. Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, and, as it were, in a dream. (The Egyptian Stamp)

Osip Mandelstam

#27. The historian must have no country. - JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

James W. Loewen

#28. Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures. "What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America" is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, "our Original Sin.

James W. Loewen