Koreans Quotes

For a long time, just skating in the Olympics had been my goal because not many Koreans had done it. ~ Kim Yuna

Nobody knows how many North Koreans have died or are dying in the famine - some estimates by foreign-aid groups run as high as three million in the period from 1995 to 1998 alone - but the rotund, jowly face of Kim Il Sung still beams down contentedly from every wall, and the 58-year-old son looks as chubby as ever, even as his slenderized subjects are mustered to applaud him. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I wish that they had the freedoms like the Japanese and the Koreans and the Mexicans and everybody else that has that freedom to come over here and play the game, because I know Cuba has a very strong baseball history. ~ Rafael Palmeiro

Again, I think we have much greater diplomatic weight by having all of us sit on the same side of the table wanting the same thing, and putting it to the North Koreans. ~ Mitchell Reiss

North Koreans are irrational to some extent, but I don't think they're totally irrational. I think they watch American cable channels. I think they watch the European cable channels. I think they, their decision makers keep up more than we know. And I think they want us to think they're a little crazy. ~ William J. Clinton

North Koreans have two stories running in their heads at all times, like trains on parallel tracks. One is what you are taught to believe; the other is what you see with your own eyes. It wasn't until I escaped to South Korea and read a translation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four that I found a word for this peculiar condition: doublethink. This is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time - and somehow not go crazy. This "doublethink" is how you can shout slogans denouncing capitalism in the morning, then browse through the market in the afternoon to buy smuggled South Korean cosmetics. It ~ Yeonmi Park

We must work with the Australians, the South Koreans, the Japanese and the Filipinos to contain China. And then we must ask for their support and their help with North Korea. Because believe it or not, China is as concerned about Kim Jong-Un as we are. ~ Carly Fiorina

Brian Myers takes a fresh approach. He largely ignores what the regime tells the outside world about itself, but concentrates instead on what North Koreans themselves are supposed to believe, paying special attention to the North Korean narratives and mass culture, including movies and television shows. ( ... ) There are few books that can give the world a peek into the Hermit Kingdom. The Cleanest Race provides a reason to care about how those in North Korea see themselves and the West. It is possibly the best addition to that small library. ~ Andrei Lankov

There's no escape for us. We are like mice trapped in a dungeon of wildcats.We are Koreans; we are cursed race and there is no hope for us as long as the Japanese are around. ~ Sook Nyul Choi

At least initially, the relationship took on a nineteenth-century epistolatory quality. The only way they could stay in touch was by letter. In 1991, while South Korea was becoming the world's largest exporter of mobile telephones, few North Koreans had ever used a telephone. You had to go to a post office to make a phone call. But even writing a letter was not a simple undertaking. Writing paper was scarce. People would write in the margins of newspapers. The paper in the state stores was made of corn husk and would crumble easily if you scratched too hard. Mi-ran had to beg her mother for the money to buy a few sheets of imported paper. Rough drafts were out of the question; paper was too precious. The distance from Pyongyang to Chongjin was only 250 miles, but letters took up to a month to be delivered. ~ Barbara Demick

The Marines in Korea never feared 'friendly fire' or artillery coming from the South Koreans - from their allies - like they did later in Vietnam, fighting with the South Vietnamese. The Koreans could be trusted. ~ David Douglas Duncan

Prayer of Peace
I offer this prayer of peace
Not to the Christian God
Nor to the Buddhist God
Nor to the Islamic God
Nor to the Jewish God
But to the God of all humanity.
For the peace that we wish for
Is Not a Christian peace
Nor a Buddhist peace
Nor an Islamic peace
Nor a Jewish peace
But a human peace
For all of us.
I offer this prayer of peace
To the God that lives within all of us
That fills us with happiness and joy
To make us whole
And help us understand life
As an expression of love for all human beings.
For no religion can be better
Than any other religion
For no truth can be truer
Than any other truth
For no nation can be bigger
Than the earth itself.
Help us all go beyond
Our small limits
And realize that we are one
That we are all from the earth.
That we are all earth people
Before we are Indians, Koreans, or Americans.

God made the earth
We humans have to make it prosper
By realizing that we are of the earth
And not of any nation, race, or religion,
By knowing that we are truly one
In our spiritual heritage.
Let us now apologize
To all humanity
For the hurt that religions have caused,
So that we can heal the hurt
Let us now promise to one another
To go beyond egotism and competition
To come together as one in God.
I offer this prayer of ~ Ilchi Lee

In contrast, Western historians, and those in South Korea, say the North attacked the South on June 25, 1950. Both sides agree that after the war began, the North Korean Army captured Seoul in three days and pushed as far south as Pusan before American troops arrived to drive back the North Koreans nearly as far north as the border to China. ~ Sheryl WuDunn

In 1991, few North Koreans had ever used a telephone. You had to go to a post office to make a phone call. ~ Barbara Demick

When I was growing up, we were taught in school that North Koreans, and especially the North Korean leadership, were all devils. ~ Park Chan-wook

He was desperately lonely. He had a hard time connecting with new people. If South Koreans were sympathetic toward him, he found them condescending. Even though he hated the North Korean regime, he found he'd get defensive when South Koreans criticized it. This was a common predicament for defectors. ~ Barbara Demick

The South Koreans treated me well. I could not bear to imagine their reaction if they'd known I'd grown up in the bosom of their archenemy. At times this felt surreal. We were all Koreans, sharing the same language and culture, yet we were technically at war. I ~ Hyeonseo Lee

With Albright at the helm of the State Department, Osama bin Laden ran wild throughout the Middle East, the North Koreans began feverishly building nukes under her nose, and we staged a pre-emptive attack solely for purposes of regime change based on false information presented to the American people by Albright about a world leader who was not an imminent threat to the United States. Slobodan Milosevic wasn't even a latent, long-term, hypothetical threat. ~ Ann Coulter

We see North Koreans as automatons, goose-steeping at parades, doing mass gymnastics with fixed smiles on their faces - but beneath all that, real life goes on with the same complexity of human emotion as anywhere else. ~ Barbara Demick

I did a lot of reading of first person accounts from Koreans and combatants and aid workers. And I spoke to relatives. A lot of wonderful photographs were made available to me from that period - 1950-1956 - and those were given to me by a Korean newspaper in Seoul. Ruined villages, refugees streaming through a river valley, GI's and orphans and orphanages, those tiny details that you can only see in a picture. ~ Chang-rae Lee

People tend to overlook the fact that North Korea's economy collapsed at about the same time as South Koreans lost faith in their own state. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a time when South Koreans were questioning the very legitimacy of their republic. ~ Brian Reynolds Myers

But when I was seven or eight years old, the film that changed my life was Titanic. It amazed me that it was a story that took place a hundred years ago. Those people living in 1912 had better technology than most North Koreans! But mostly I couldn't believe how someone could make a movie out of such a shameful love story. In North Korea, the filmmakers would have been executed. No real human stories were allowed, nothing but propaganda about the Leader. But in Titanic, the characters talked about love and humanity. I was amazed that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were willing to die for love, not just for the regime, as we were. The idea that people could choose their own destinies fascinated me. This pirated Hollywood movie gave me my first small taste of freedom. ~ Yeonmi Park

You've got the North Koreans building weapons; you got the Iranians building weapons. You've got - the Pakistanis already have at least 100 nuclear weapons. Do you think there's any serious effort in this country to come to grips with that? ~ Newt Gingrich

It's frightening to think about more sanctions. When I've met North Koreans in China, they've said to me, 'You have no idea how difficult our lives are. We live like dogs.' They wake up in the morning wondering what they're going to eat for dinner. ~ Barbara Demick

I have nothing against the North Koreans but this Kim Jong Un has got a screw loose. A member of his cabinet, his security minister, nods off, falls sleep. We've all done it. Kim Jong Un takes the guy out and has him executed, just for just falling asleep. Oh, and he was also deflating footballs. ~ David Letterman

[Greenberg] knew that cultural legacies matter--that they are powerful and pervasive and that they persist, long after their original usefulness has passed. But he didn't assume that legacies are an indelible part of who we are. He believed that if the Koreans were honest about where they came from and were willing to confront those aspects of their heritage that did not suit the aviation world, they could change. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union was more mature about this whole thing than I think the North Koreans will be. ~ Lawrence Eagleburger

When North Koreans cross the border into China, they are stunned to learn that the Chinese can afford to eat rice daily, sometimes for three meals daily. ~ Barbara Demick

The North Koreans or Chinese may have a million men in uniform but it's about how you perform. ~ Philip Hammond

The Berlin Wall fell because the East Germans saw the West had more. The Koreans don't like the Japanese and try to prove to them that they are worth more in the industrial arena. ~ Stef Wertheimer

Drying her eyes, Mother said to Totto-chan very slowly, You're Japanese and Masao-chan comes from a country called Korea. But he's a child, just like you. So, Totto-chan, dear, don't ever think of people as different. Don't think, 'That person's a Japanese, or this person's a Korean.' Be nice to Masao-chan. It's so sad that some people think other people aren't nice just because they're Koreans. ~ Tetsuko Kuroyanagi

North Koreans were indoctrinated from birth to believe that their lives were meaningless, that they existed only to serve the State, the Revolution, and the Great Leader. ~ Max Brooks

Hey! Can you hear me? I'm talking to the American asshole who just told my daughter she was going to die. She says you put something inside her head, some sort of explosive. If that's true, you better hope that thing doesn't go off because if it does, you might as well kill yourself. I know what you're thinking. There's a good chance Moscow will do the same thing and kill me. There's always a possibility the Chinese or Koreans will kill me, but I wouldn't bet on that. You see, I'm not the easiest person to be with. I can be a bit of a dick sometimes, just ask my daughter. My point is if people keep me around, it's not because of my charming personality, it's because I have legs that bend the wrong way, and that's kind of useful if you also happen to have Themis. So on the off chance that I make it through this, I want you to listen to me very carefully. I don't give a shit who this robot belongs to an hour from now. I will fucking kill you. I will mow down whatever place you work at and the house you live in. I will kill everyone you've ever known, your high-school teacher, people you play softball with. I will march down Washington Avenue and turn DC into a fucking sandbox. I will end you and everything you hold dear. There. Will. Be. No United States when I'm done with you, and there is nothing, not a goddamn thing, you can do to stop me. Do you hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME, MOTHERFUCKER? ANSWER ME! ~ Sylvain Neuvel

We are hopeful that the North Koreans can show a little bit more realism, a little bit more flexibility. ~ Mitchell Reiss

Well, your God is silent and sleeping while the Japanese are busy torturing and killing us Koreans. We are as helpless as flies and it is getting worse as the war goes on. ~ Sook Nyul Choi

In the spring of 2007, Israeli intelligence brought to Washington proof that the Assad regime in Syria was building a nuclear reactor along the Euphrates - with North Korean help. This reactor was a copy of the Yongbyon reactor the North Koreans had built, and was part of a Syrian nuclear weapons program. ~ Elliott Abrams

Consider a nonstatistics example: Did the U.S. invasion of Iraq make America safer? There is only one intellectually honest answer: We will never know. The reason we will never know is that we do not know - and cannot know - what would have happened if the United States had not invaded Iraq. True, the United States did not find weapons of mass destruction. But it is possible that on the day after the United States did not invade Iraq Saddam Hussein could have climbed into the shower and said to himself, "I could really use a hydrogen bomb. I wonder if the North Koreans will sell me one?" After that, who knows? ~ Charles Wheelan

In Toronto and Los Angeles, too, there are a lot of Koreans - Koreatown, Korean markets. I feel like I'm at home and very comfortable. ~ Kim Yuna

The Republicans finally got some good news over the weekend. The North Koreans set off a nuclear bomb. Thank God. It was so powerful it knocked the Mark Foley story right off the front page. And knocked him off the page he was on, too. ~ Jay Leno

the stories of Koreans in Japan should be told somehow when so much of their lives had been despised, denied, and erased. ~ Min Jin Lee

while Koreans also are relatively group-oriented, they also have a strong individualistic streak like most Westerners. Koreans frequently joke that an individual Korean can beat an individual Japanese, but that a group of Koreans are certain to be beaten by a group of Japanese."36 The rate of employee turnover, raiding of other companies' skilled labor, and the like are all higher in Korea than in Japan.37 Anecdotally, there would seem to be a lower level of informal work-oriented socializing in Korea than in Japan, with employees heading home to their families at the end of the day rather than staying on to drink in the evenings with their workmates.38 ~ Francis Fukuyama

I used to joke that I came to England - not to the U.S. where most Koreans go - because I like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. ~ Ha-Joon Chang

Wherever Koreans are, they set up a church. ~ Sandra Oh

Laurie piped up again. 'At State, everybody calls diversity dispersity. What happens is, everybody has their own clubs, their own signs, their own sections where they all sit in the dining hall--all the African Americans are over there? . . . and all the Asians sit over't these other tables? -- except for the Koreans? -- because they don't get along with the Japanese so they sit way over there? Everybody's dispersed into their own little groups -- and everybody's told to distrust everybody else? Everybody's told that everybody else is trying to screw them over--oops!' -- Laurie pulled a face and put her fingertips over her lips -- 'I'm sorry!' She rolled eyes and smiled. 'Anyway, the idea is, every other group is like prejudiced against your group, and no matter what they say, they're only out to take advantage of you, and you should have nothing to do with them -- unless your white, in which case all the others are not prejudiced against you, they're like totally right, because you really are a racist and everything, even if you don't know it? Everybody ends up dispersed into their own like turtle shells, suspicious of everybody else and being careful not to fraternize with them. Is it like that at Dupont? ~ Tom Wolfe

The poor Americans are so busy defending the rights of Hindus in Pakistan, Moslems in India, Jews in Palestine, Koreans in Japan, Italians in Yugoslavia and Hungarians in Czechoslovakia that they simply cannot give a thought to Negroes in the United States. ~ George Mikes

I would not suggest the U.S. should sit down with the North Koreans bilaterally immediately after they've fired missiles - because the appearance is that you reward bad behavior. But if North Korea behaves for some period of time, I would pretty much favor direct talks. ~ Richard Armitage

The agency was started by the tribe's economic development corporation, in an effort to diversify from its gambling casino called "WinnaVegas." You read this right: Plains Indians publishing Arabic brochures for Nebraskans who are importing machinery from Koreans to be customized by a South Sioux City company for customers in Kuwait. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

In the Bronx, you have the southern Italians; in Queens, the Greeks, Koreans and Chinese; in Brooklyn, the Jewish community; and in Harlem, the Hispanics - all with their own markets. ~ Daniel Boulud

If sitting still meant you starved to death, no threat the regime levied could keep people home. For the first time, North Koreans were wandering around their own country with impunity. ~ Barbara Demick

Rigor mattered. Koreans understood that mastering difficult academic content was important. They didn't take shortcuts, especially in math. They assumed that performance was mostly a product of hard work - not God-given talent. This attitude meant that all kids tried harder, and it was more valuable to a country than gold or oil. ~ Amanda Ripley

The city of 500,000 is wedged between a granite spine of mountains zigzagging up and down the coast and the Sea of Japan, which Koreans call the East Sea. ~ Barbara Demick

In fact, Japanese Koreans, who were known as kitachosenjin, after the Japanese term for North Korea, Kita Chosen, lived in a world apart. They had distinctive accents and tended to marry one another. Although they were far from rich by Japanese standards, they were wealthy compared with ordinary North Koreans. ~ Barbara Demick

Every day the same things came up; the work was never done, and the tedium of it began to weigh on me. Part of what made English a difficult subject for Korean students was the lack of a more active principle in their learning. They were accustomed to receiving, recording, and memorizing. That's the Confucian mode. As a student, you're not supposed to question a teacher; you should avoid asking for explanations because that might reveal a lack of knowledge, which can be seen as an insult to the teacher's efforts. You don't have an open, free exchange with teachers as we often have here in the West. And further, under this design, a student doesn't do much in the way of improvisation or interpretation.

This approach might work well for some pursuits, may even be preferred--indeed, I was often amazed by the way Koreans learned crafts and skills, everything from basketball to calligraphy, for example, by methodically studying and reproducing a defined set of steps (a BBC report explained how the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had his minions rigorously study the pizza-making techniques used by Italian chefs so that he could get a good pie at home, even as thousands of his subjects starved)--but foreign-language learning, the actual speaking component most of all, has to be more spontaneous and less rigid.

We all saw this played out before our eyes and quickly discerned the problem. A student cannot hope to sit in a class and have a language handed over to ~ Cullen Thomas

In her world, the law was upside down. People had to break the law to live. The prohibition on drug-dealing, a serious crime in most countries, is not viewed in the same way – as protective of society – by North Koreans. It is viewed as a risk, like unauthorized parking. If you can get away with it, where's the harm? ~ Hyeonseo Lee

The popularity of figure skating has increased tremendously, and Koreans have a huge interest in figure skaters - not only me, other international skaters as well. ~ Kim Yuna

The book has had one unexpected side effect: by disdaining Koreans' complaints, it actually touches upon Japan's less-then-noble history with Korea, which is something the Ministry of Education has worked hard to keep out of the public school system. Apparently not knowing history means never having to say you're story. ~ Jake Adelstein

Guess what? The Nazis didn't lose the war after all. They won it and flourished. They took over the world and wiped out every last Jew, every last Gypsy, black, East Indian, and American Indian. Then, when they were finished with that, they wiped out the Russians and the Poles and the Bohemians and the Moravians and the Bulgarians and the Serbians and the Croatians--all the Slavs. Then they started in on the Polynesians and the Koreans and the Chinese and the Japanese--all the peoples of Asia. This took a long, long time, but when it was all over, everyone in the world was one hundred percent Aryan, and they were all very, very happy. Naturally the textbooks used in the schools no longer mentioned any race but the Aryan or any language but German or any religion but Hitlerism or any political system but National Socialism. There would have been no point. After a few generations of that, no one could have put anything different into the textbooks even if they'd wanted to, because they didn't know anything different. But one day, two young students were conversing at the University of New Heidelberg in Tokyo. Both were handsome in the usual Aryan way, but one of them looked vaguely worried and unhappy. That was Kurt. His friend said, "What's wrong, Kurt? Why are you always moping around like this?" Kurt said, "I'll tell you, Hans. There is something that's troubling me--and troubling me deeply." His friend asked what it was. "It's this," Kurt said. "I cannot shake the crazy fee ~ Daniel Quinn

The North Koreans have gained, or bought, a lot of time through the six-party-talks framework to pursue their own agenda. ~ Lee Myung-bak

As North Koreans, we were innocent in a way that I cannot fully explain. ~ Yeonmi Park

To Koreans on the other side, we care about your freedom. ~ Kim Young-sam

For example, the use of chemical weapons [in Syria]- some on the Democrat side have said well, this encourages the North Koreans to use chemical weapons against our troops. ~ Rand Paul

It was still hard for a Korean to become a Japanese citizen, and there were many who considered such a thing shameful - for a Korean to try to become a citizen of its former oppressor. When she told her friends in New York about this curious historical anomaly and the pervasive ethnic bias, they were incredulous at the thought that the friendly, well-mannered Japanese they knew could ever think she was somehow criminal, lazy, filthy, or aggressive - the negative stereotypical traits of Koreans in Japan. ~ Min Jin Lee

Yes, I don't believe that the inter-Korean relationship has, quote, 'deteriorated' since I assumed office. Rather I believe that the relationship between the two Koreas is entering into a new phase - a time of transition. And so I think that the North Koreans are trying to see what they can build with this, with my new administration. ~ Lee Myung-bak

It was this: Blue, teetering on the edge of offense, saying, I don't understand why you keep saying such awful things about Koreans. About yourself. And Henry saying, I will do it before anyone else can. It is the only way to not be angry all of the time. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

All the POWs worked hard for their captors, the North Koreans. We had been told that if we worked hard, we would be treated fairly. Instead, we were exploited. ~ Young-Bok Yoo