Daily Inspiration Quote by Iris Chang

History doesn not just slip away; it has to be pried from the hands of people who would rather it stay buried. Iris Chang's line lands with the quiet menace of lived experience: "relics" are not only artifacts in a museum case, but the documents, testimonies, and physical evidence that make denial harder and accountability possible. The verb choice matters. You dont discover relics; you "hang onto" them, like someone clinging to a railing in rough water. Memory is presented as labor, not inheritance.

As a historian best known for The Rape of Nanking, Chang wrote in a climate where the past was aggressively contested: survivors aging out of public life, governments incentivized to soften narratives, and national pride invested in selective amnesia. The subtext is that forgetting is not accidental. It is manufactured through neglect (lost archives, untranslated diaries), intimidation (silenced witnesses), and bureaucracy (records classified, access restricted). Calling these materials "relics" also hints at reverence and fragility. They are precious, yet treated as disposable when they inconvenience power.

The line doubles as an indictment of the historical profession's burden. Chang isn't romanticizing the archive; she's warning that evidence has a shelf life, and that every year of delay benefits the people who want history to become rumor. Its a sentence that makes preservation feel like an ethical stance: to keep the relics is to refuse the comfort of clean stories.