Daily Inspiration Quote by Iris Chang

Body counts are a brutal shortcut: they let history feel sortable, like a spreadsheet where tragedy can be “weighed” and then filed away. Iris Chang refuses that convenience. Her line insists that atrocity isn’t only a question of scale but of method - of what was done to bodies, families, and the idea of human limits. The phrase “keep in mind” reads almost like a reprimand to audiences and institutions that prefer clean totals because totals travel well: they fit memorial plaques, textbooks, and diplomatic language. The “manner” does not.

Chang’s specific intent is corrective and moral. She’s arguing against the quiet politics of abstraction, where mass violence becomes a statistic and, by becoming a statistic, becomes debatable, relativized, even negotiable. “Not just about the numbers” is a warning about how denial and minimization operate: if you can trap an event inside a contested figure, you can dodge the uglier question of what the violence was trying to accomplish. Method reveals motive. Systematic rape, torture, mutilation, humiliation, and public spectacle aren’t incidental excesses; they’re signals of terror as policy, domination as theater.

The subtext is also about empathy and historical responsibility. Chang is asking readers to inhabit the victim’s experience, not merely acknowledge their existence. That demand matters in the context of her work on the Nanjing Massacre, where international recognition and Japanese public memory have been fraught for decades. In that terrain, “how” becomes evidence - and remembrance becomes an argument against the world’s instinct to move on once it has a number.