North Korea Famine Quotes

Tens of thousands of North Korean women have been sold to Chinese men. By some estimates, three quarters of the roughly 100,000 North Korean refugees living in China are women and more than half of them live in arranged unions with Chinese men. ~ Barbara Demick

(The North Korean army had to lower its height requirement from five feet three in the early 1990s because of the stunting of the younger generation.) ~ Barbara Demick

North Korean students and intellectuals didn't dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root. ~ Barbara Demick

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

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said any assumption that the US would not use force against North Korea would be a mistake. Such bellicosity frightens liberals. The left's reaction to nutty despots is: he might hit me, so I'll be nice. Rumsfeld's idea is: He'll hit me? Maybe I'll hit him. The beauty of that approach cannot be denied. ~ Ann Coulter

We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too ... Over a period of three years or so, we killed off - what - twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure? ~ Curtis LeMay

Darling, I may have to work late, so I might not be here when you get back. I hope you had a great time in North Korea and disabled a lot of nuclear weapons. With all my love, Josh. ~ Ally Carter

The latest political rumor, North Korea ruler Kim Jong Il is close to naming his successor. Yeah, he said the only person with glasses big enough to replace me is Nicole Richie. ~ Conan O'Brien

At a time when we are facing threats from nations such as North Korea and Iran, and attempting to convince others such as India and Pakistan to become responsible nuclear powers, it is vital that America reclaims the leadership we once had on arms control. ~ Ellen Tauscher

The U.S. along with China, Japan, South Korea and Russia has an important role to play in containing North Korea's nuclear ambitions and exerting all the influence we can possibly exert. ~ Zach Wamp

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

I wrote a piece from North Korea called Visit to a Small Planet which is a line I stole from a play of Gore Vidal's, because it did seem to me as if I had left this planet completely to go on this visit to the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, and it was as if coming back from another spatial body altogether. ~ Christopher Hitchens

There are also hunger strikes. Hunger strikes are noble and sometimes necessary. If you're a political prisoner in China or North Korea (where the entire country is on a hunger strike, not by choice), I get it. For you, it's life or death. But at Harvard, it's about a press clipping and maybe getting a better grade or a higher class of hand job. So when an undergrad adopts a hunger strike in order to get someone to divest from oil, I say, let the twerp starve. Most of them are overfed, pudgy masses of soft tissue - it wouldn't hurt if these sad sacks lost a few pounds. They might even understand the plight of the average Venezuelan, who operates under conditions American activists see as utopian, when they're really nightmarish. How about the next time one of our coeds feels a hunger strike coming on, we exchange her with someone who's genuinely starving? ~ Greg Gutfeld

My civil rights will not be trampled, and I say this not for me but for my children, and all those who yearn to breathe free. Those who make your Apple products at Foxxcon, those who languish in prisons in Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela. Those homosexuals who are stoned to death in the streets of Egypt or Iran, while our so-called civil rights leaders hold coffee klatches with third graders in the White House. ~ Glenn Beck

Are you really questioning the wisdom of central planning? Because the happy citizens of Cuba and North Korea beg to differ. ~ Jonathan Gruber

If we are to assume that North Korea becomes a nuclear-power state, of course the danger of having an all-out nuclear war, that possibility is very slim. ~ Lee Myung-bak

Even in parts of the showcase capital of Pyongyang, you can stroll down the middle of a main street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side. ~ Barbara Demick

I cannot, of course, prove that there is no supervising deity who invigilates my every moment
and who will pursue me even after I am dead. (I can only be happy that there is no evidence for
such a ghastly idea, which would resemble a celestial North Korea in which liberty was not just
impossible but inconceivable.) But nor has any theologian ever demonstrated the contrary. This
would perhaps make the believer and the doubter equal - except that the believer claims to know,
not just that God exists, but that his most detailed wishes are not merely knowable but actually
known. Since religion drew its first breath when the species lived in utter ignorance and
considerable fear, I hope I may be forgiven for declining to believe that another human being can
tell me what to do, in the most intimate details of my life and mind, and to further dictate these
terms as if acting as proxy for a supernatural entity. This tyrannical idea is very much older than
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Christianity, of course, but I do sometimes think that Christians have less excuse for believing, let
alone wishing, that such a horrible thing could be true. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Like Nazi concentration camps, labour camps in North Korea use confinement, hunger and fear to create a kind of Skinner box: a closed, closely regulated chamber in which guards assert absolute control over prisoners. Yet while Auschwitz existed for only three years, Camp 14 is a fifty-year-old Skinner box, an ongoing longitudinal experiment in repression and mind control in which guards breed prisoners whom they control, isolate and pit against each other from birth. ~ Blaine Harden

North Korea not only wants unification, it absolutely has to have unification. That's really the only way this state can feel secure. ~ Brian Reynolds Myers

WITHIN A FEW HOURS of the noon announcement, people all around North Korea began converging on statues of Kim Il-sung to pay their respects. By one frequently cited figure there are 34,000 statues of the Great Leader in the country and at each of them loyal subjects prostrated themselves with grief. People didn't want to be alone with their grief. They burst out of their homes and ran toward the statues, which were in fact the spiritual centers of each city.

Chongjin is home to some 500,000 people, but has only one twenty-five-foot bronze statue, at Pohang Square. People filled the vast square, and spilled over into the front lawn of the Revolutionary History Museum directly to the east. The crowds extended down the wide Road No. 1 all the way to the Provincial Theater and radiated out into the surrounding streets like spokes from a wheel. From above, the people looked like a line of ants streaming toward a common goal.

Hysteria and crowds make for a lethal combination. People started to surge forward, knocking down those in line, trampling people already prostrate on the ground, flattening the carefully trimmed hedges. From blocks away, the noise from the square carried through the humid air and sounded like the roar of a riot. The weather alternated between violent downpours and searing heat. No one was allowed to wear a hat or carry a parasol. The sun beat down on the bare heads and the wet sidewalks turned the streets into a roiling steambath. Peop ~ Barbara Demick

It had been Ari who proposed the term Kimunism for the strange form of xenophobic nationalism practiced under the Kim family dynasty; it was not really socialism, nor was it communism in even the Maoist form, despite the heaviness of its cult of personality. Ari had felt that it was the severity and chimeric plasticity of the system, so provocative, that made it appealing to French intellectuals. ~ David Cronenberg

One of the most important reasons for North Korea continuing its nuclear ambitions is to consolidate the power to stay within the Kim Jong Il family. ~ Lee Myung-bak

North Korea conducted a nuclear test and the blast was so small that many scientists are saying it was a dud. Apparently, the nuclear bomb didn't work well because it was made in Korea. ~ Conan O'Brien

In the past, I've visited remote places - North Korea, Ethiopia, Easter Island - partly as a way to visit remote states of mind: remote parts of myself that I wouldn't ordinarily explore. ~ Pico Iyer

The crises in North Korea, Iran, the Middle East, show how quickly things can change and how they can go wrong. We must be prepared. And right now the Army is not. ~ Ike Skelton

What else has changes since 1984? Oil's running our, I say Earth's population is eight billion, mass extinction of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era. Aparteid's dead, as are the Castros in Cuba as is privacy. The USSR went bankrupt; the Eastern bloc collapsed; Germany reunified; the EU has gone federal; China's a powerhouse- though their air is industrial effluence in a gaseous state - and North Korea is still a gulag run by a coiffed cannibal. p 500 ~ David Mitchell

To survive, China had to open up to the West. It could not survive otherwise. This was after many millions have died of hunger in a country that was like North Korea is today. Once we became part of global competition, we had to agree to some rules. It's painful, but we had to. Otherwise there was no way to survive. ~ Ai Weiwei

North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. ~ George W. Bush

North Korea is willing to go to any lengths for the whole world to honor its demands of 'Ooh, please pay attention to us.' ~ Stephen Colbert

If they think they can get anyone who could have better handled the complex and difficult issues surrounding North Korea, Iran and other controversies, they are not understanding the world right now. ~ Mohamed ElBaradei

The good performed by some of United Nations institutions, such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF, has been outweighed by the amount of bad the UN has either abetted or allowed. It has enabled genocide in Rwanda, done little or nothing to stop genocide in the Congo and Sudan, given a respectable forum to tyrannies, convened conferences (the Durban Conferences on racism) that simply became forums for anti-Semitism, and been preoccupied with vilifying one of its relatively few humane states, Israel. Its moral failings were further exemplified by its placing Qaddafi's Libya on its Human Rights Commission, Iran on its Commission on the Status of Women, and North Korea on the Nuclear Disarmament Commission. It is not that the people who run the United Nations are bad people; it is that the United Nations is run by a majority of the world's governments, and they are run by bad people. Without America in the Security Council, the bad would nearly always prevail. ~ Dennis Prager

...travel permits to Pyongyang were notoriously hard to get. In order to keep Pyongyang as a showcase city, the North Korean government restricted visitors. ~ Barbara Demick

I've been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world. ~ Christopher Hitchens

So South Korean ability is very much limited to handle North Korean, you know, difficulties. So we don't want to see an immediate collapse of the North Korea regime. ~ Kim Dae-jung