North Korean Famine Quotes

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

North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read the Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as 'duck.' One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy - they wouldn't tell me the breed - but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the realization that I hadn't seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there. ~ Christopher Hitchens

A local phrase book, entitled Speak in Korean, has the following handy expressions. In the section 'On the Way to the Hotel': 'Let's Mutilate US Imperialism!' In the section 'Word Order': 'Yankees are wolves in human shape - Yankees / in human shape / wolves / are.' In the section 'Farewell Talk': 'The US Imperialists are the sworn enemy of the Korean people.' Not that the book is all like this - the section 'At the Hospital' has the term solsaga ('I have loose bowels'), and the section 'Our Foreign Friends Say' contains the Korean for 'President Kim Il Sung is the sun of mankind.'
I wanted a spare copy of this phrase book to give to a friend, but found it was hard to come by. Perhaps this was a sign of a new rapprochement with the United States, or perhaps it was because, on page 46, in the section on the seasons, appear the words: haemada pungnyoni dumnida ('We have a bumper harvest every year'). ~ Christopher Hitchens

Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey. ~ Hyeonseo Lee

By the end of 1998, the worst of the famine was over, not necessarily because anything had improved but, as Mrs. Song later surmised, because there were fewer mouths to feed. ~ Barbara Demick

Chang-bo took to his bed, or rather to the quilts on the floor that was all they had left. His legs swelled up like balloons with what Mrs. Song had come to recognize as edema - fluid retention brought on by starvation. He talked incessantly about food. He spoke of the tofu soups his mother made him as a child and an unusually delicious meal of steamed crab with ginger that Mrs. Song had cooked for him when they were newlyweds. He had an uncanny ability to remember details of dishes she had cooked decades earlier. He was sweetly sentimental, even romantic, when he spoke about their meals together. He would take her hand in his own, his eyes wet and cloudy with the mist of his memories.
"Come, darling. Let's go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine," he told his wife one morning when they were stirring on the blankets. They hadn't eaten in three days. Mrs. Song looked at her husband with alarm, worried that he was hallucinating.
She ran out the door to the market, moving fast and forgetting all about the pain in her back. She was determined to steal, beg - whatever it took - to get some food for her husband. She spotted her older sister selling noodles. Her sister wasn't faring well - her skin was flaked just like Chang-bo's from malnutrition - so Mrs. Song had resisted asking her for help, but now she was desperate, and of course, her sister couldn't refuse.
"I'll pay you back," Mrs. Song promised as she ran back home, the adrenaline pu ~ Barbara Demick

Even North Korean people who are not necessarily happy with economic policies are still loyal to the state itself. It's a military-first state, so whether it does very well on the economic front or not, is not central to public support for it. ~ Brian Reynolds Myers

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

Any online gamblers here? Well, Congress is looking in shutting that down.There's going to be a massive congressional investigation of online gambling and they're going to shut it down. And when they get done with that, they're going to look into this North Korean thing. ~ David Letterman

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

I want them (the North Korean delegation) to understand that it would be difficult to see progress of the normalization talks unless we see their sincerity over the abduction, nuclear and missile issues. ~ Koichi Haraguchi

...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

Though it has no intrinsic value – you cannot eat or drink a dollar bill – trust in the dollar and in the wisdom of the Federal Reserve is so firm that it is shared even by Islamic fundamentalists, Mexican drug lords and North Korean tyrants. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Part of my heritage being Korean, it's going to be interesting going to Korea and answering these questions dealing with North and South Korea. ~ Rick Yune

But obviously, we've got to stand with our North Korean allies. ~ Sarah Palin

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

I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose? ~ Azar Nafisi

Because Pyongyang is the only North Korean city frequented by foreigners, the regime goes to great lengths to ensure that its inhabitants make a good impression with their appearance and are ideologically sound. ~ Barbara Demick

He wanted to know what assurance we could give the American people that we aren't getting the tar licked out of us by the North Korean army. It has never happened to us. It won't happen this time. ~ Harry S. Truman

The North Korean regime remains one of the world's leading proliferator of missile technology, including transfers to Iran and Syria. The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable of the consequences of such action. ~ George W. Bush

It was officially known as Kwan-li-so Number 18. That meant Penal Labor Colony in Korean. It was a concentration camp. It was a gulag. It actually was hell, near the Taedong River in North Korea's P'yongan-namdo province. ~ David Baldacci

A South Korean teenager, 18-year-old male, is about five inches taller than his North Korean counterpart. And there are many soldiers who are only about 4'6". The height requirement is supposed to be 4'9". That's the size of my 12-year-old son. ~ Barbara Demick

The oldest of North Korean labor camps, Bukchang had been hosting dissidents and alleged enemies of the state since the fifties . ~ David Baldacci

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

They said these North Korean missiles had enough range to hit Seattle, but residents in Seattle were not worried. Today Bill Gates said Microsoft has enough missiles to destroy North Korea ten times over. ~ Jay Leno

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

North Korea. Not only does North Korean have nuclear weapons, but their leadership appears to not be rational. ~ Ted Lieu

When I do an Asian character or an Asian voice I'm doing one because that's my heritage and my family and where I come from. My family is of Korean descent and specifically North Korean descent. So it makes sense for me to talk about that issue because it's the only weapon I have to somehow avenge my family and my history. ~ Margaret Cho

A North Korean soldier would later recall a buddy who had been given an American-made nail clipper and was showing it off to his friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edges, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sinking heart: If North Korea couldn't make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons? ~ Barbara Demick

We probably could more successfully resolve the North Korean nuclear threat through game-theoretic reasoning. We could successfully resolve what American leaders seem to perceive as an Iranian nuclear threat through game-theoretic reasoning. ~ Bruce Bueno De Mesquita

Then there was David, lording it up at Buckingham Palace, thinking he was king of the shit heap. That guy was definitely nuts, like every dictator that had gone before him. Nero, Caligula, Henry the Eighth, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Margaret Thatcher, Colonel Gaddafi, that crazy North Korean bastard who was in Team America, Kim Jong whatever. ~ Charlie Higson

North Korea is a necrocracy, or a mauselocracy or a thanatocracy in which the one [Kim Il-sung] is diffused into being with the other [Kim Jong Il], and where both of them are said to have had miraculous births attended by miraculous phenomena such as, for example, birds singing in Korean, when they were born. ~ Christopher Hitchens

North Korea's whole idea is to create a crisis to solve a crisis. They're so poor and they're so desperate that they realize that this bombastic rhetoric can drive the South Korean stock market down and get the U.S. in a tizzy. And it's a game they've been playing for many, many years. ~ Barbara Demick

The North Korean landscape is strikingly beautiful in places. It could be said to resemble America's Pacific Northwest - but substantially drained of color. ~ Barbara Demick

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

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

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

Although North Korea's position differs (from Tokyo's), Japan's basic stance remains unchanged ? to seek sincere responses from the North Korean side to resolve the abduction and nuclear issues, ~ Junichiro Koizumi

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un reportedly has had 15 of his top officials executed. So the lesson here is when Kim Jong Un comes to work with a new haircut, you tell him, 'Looking good, Un.' ~ Conan O'Brien