North Korea Quotes

1. "But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer."
Author: Adam Johnson

2. "The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth."
Author: Adam Johnson

3. "North Korea invites parody. We laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people. But consider that their indoctrination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour days spent in factory day-care centers; that for the subsequent fifty years, every song, film, newspaper article, and billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung's divinity. Who could possibly resist?"
Author: Barbara Demick

4. "If North Koreans paused to contemplate the obvious inconsistencies and lies in what they were told, they would find themselves in a dangerous place. They didn't have a choice. They couldn't flee their country, depose their leadership, speak out, or protest. In order to fit in, the average citizen had to discipline himself not to think too much."
Author: Barbara Demick

5. "As she sat alone in the apartment, the enormity of it all started to sink in. Any hope that the North Korean regime might change with the death of Kim Il-sung was quickly dashed. The power had passed to his son. Things weren't going to get any better. She heard her father's words replaying in her ears. "The son is even worse than the father." "Now we're really fucked," she said to herself. Only then did tears of self-pity fill her eyes."
Author: Barbara Demick

6. "North Korean defectors often find it hard to settle down. It is not easy for somebody who's escaped a totalitarian country to live in the free world. Defectors have to rediscover who they are in a world that offers endless possibilities. Choosing where to live, what to do, even which clothes to put on in the morning is tough enough for those of us accustomed to making choices; it can be utterly paralyzing for people who've had decisions made for them by the state their entire lives."
Author: Barbara Demick

7. "Cal: "I'm really sorry, Professor, but how do you explain these ? Swiss Cake Rolls. That doesn't rhyme; it's not cute; it's not childlike. And this is one of our most-respected snack foods, is it not? How is that, Professor? Hmmm?"Eliot: "Well, isn't it obvious? We trust the Swiss for their ability to engineer things, to build with precision."Cal: "We do?"Eliot: "Do I even have to mention Swiss watches? Swiss Army knives? Swiss cheese? If anyone can build a non-threatening, non-lethal snack cake, it's the Swiss. They're neutral, we can trust them not to attack us with trans-fatty acids and sugar. I think you would feel differently if they were German Cake Rolls. North Korean Cake Rolls. I bet you wouldn't eat them."Cal: "I bet I would."
Author: Brad Barkley

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

9. "I was hungry when I left Pyongyang. I wasn't hungry just for a bookshop that sold books that weren't about Fat Man and Little Boy. I wasn't ravenous just for a newspaper that had no pictures of F.M. and L.B. I wasn't starving just for a TV program or a piece of music or theater or cinema that wasn't cultist and hero-worshiping. I was hungry. I got off the North Korean plane in Shenyang, one of the provincial capitals of Manchuria, and the airport buffet looked like a cornucopia. I fell on the food, only to find that I couldn't do it justice, because my stomach had shrunk. And as a foreign tourist in North Korea, under the care of vigilant minders who wanted me to see only the best, I had enjoyed the finest fare available."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

10. "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."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

11. "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."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

12. "So this is the way we live now: conditioned by the awareness that no North Korean provocation, however egregious, can be confronted, lest it furnish the occasion or pretext for something truly barbarous and insane."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

13. "Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

14. "First Afghanistan, now Iraq. So who's next? Syria? North Korea? Iran? Where will it all end?' If these illegal interventions are permitted to continue, the implication seems to be, pretty soon, horror of horrors, no murderously repressive regimes might remain."
Author: Daniel Kofman

15. "Up until the end of the Bush Administration, there was indifference to the North Korean suffering under Kim Jong-Il."
Author: Ed Royce

16. "Iranians are very proud and don't want to become a pariah state like North Korea."
Author: Edward Luck

17. "Of course, China is a key to the North Korea if we're going to solve that riddle, but they could also be helpful on Iraq, which is why it's important that we maintain a constructive dialogue with China."
Author: Frank Carlucci

18. "I think the issue of North Korea is one where the international community as a whole has to work to resolve the crisis."
Author: Helen Clark

19. "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."
Author: Ike Skelton

20. "At 13:57 local time, a low yield nuclear warhead exploded in the city of Chongjin, North Korea.A long standing military target. Chongjin is home to some 532,000 men, women, and children.This city has survived a number of wars. It will not survive this.But her people will.As 13:57 and .00001 microseconds, half a million Koreans seemed to materialize on a hilltop 35 miles away from the blast.They were carried there . . . One at a time, sometimes two . . .At a hair's breadth short of the speed of light . . . By one man . . .The Flash. The Fastest Man Alive."
Author: Joe Kelly

21. "Proliferation of nuclear weapons to terrorist organisations is far more dangerous than proliferation of nuclear weapons to states, even states like North Korea."
Author: John Bruton

22. "We have it. The smoking gun. The evidence. The potential weapon of mass destruction we have been looking for as our pretext of invading Iraq. There's just one problem - it's in North Korea."
Author: Jon Stewart

23. "So moderate is insisting that North Korea should open door to outside."
Author: Kim Dae Jung

24. "You know, North Korea situation is far worse than East Germany, and South Korea is weaker than West Germany."
Author: Kim Dae Jung

25. "And also, we are providing, you know, a nuclear power plant in the north, two light water systems, so some 4 or 5 billion dollars we are providing to meet with North Korean requests on the condition North Korea will not produce a nuclear weapon."
Author: Kim Dae Jung

26. "All of North Korea is a jail."
Author: Kim Young Sam

27. "I don't think the current regime of South Korea will deal actively with the issue of North Korean defectors."
Author: Kim Young Sam

28. "Once a major military confrontation occurs, North Korea will definitely be annihilated."
Author: Kim Young Sam

29. "Some day, somebody is going to have to start talking about what happens to us all a decade from now if we let these North Koreans and the Iranians go forward with their nuclear weapons program."
Author: Lawrence Eagleburger

30. "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."
Author: Lawrence Eagleburger

31. "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."
Author: Lee Myung Bak

32. "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."
Author: Max Brooks

33. "Japan continues to work closely with the United States on the issue of the North Korean nuclear crisis and has played an important and constructive role in the Six-Party talks."
Author: Michael K. Simpson

34. "The 'Axis of Evil' was - and is - very real, as the tyrants of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea knew full well."
Author: Michael Ledeen

35. "The format's better because it gives us a much stronger hand to play when going to the North Koreans unified, with our allies and partners in the region, all of us saying the same thing: telling them their current course is unacceptable."
Author: Mitchell Reiss

36. "Any agreement that you have isn't going to be based on North Korea's intentions or trust."
Author: Mitchell Reiss

37. "Now North Korea certainly is located in a different place geographically, but I think it faces the same type of strategic decision. Does it want a different future for its people?"
Author: Mitchell Reiss

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

39. "North Korea is not an insane nation. It is not a crazy nation."
Author: Richard Armitage

40. "It seems not to matter that we are at the brink of a war that may spread beyond Afghanistan and Iraq to Iran and Georgia and then where? To Syria? To North Korea? To China? That we in America are in economic doldrums and are seeing small businesses fold and houses reclaimed by banks and a smouldering panic that is palpable everywhere."
Author: Richard Schiff

41. "A number of Americans were used, most often unwillingly, by North Korea to arm spies with English-speaking skills so they could target American interests in South Korea and beyond."
Author: Robert Jenkins

42. "Bear in mind North Korea has been the leading source, a leading source of nuclear technology and of missile delivery systems to some of the world's great rogues in Iran and Syria."
Author: Robert McFarlane

43. "We've seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realizing the power of this medium to organize people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we're seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world."
Author: Sergey Brin

44. "It's our job to get into the hardest-to-see places and bring back the best footage - we have the best footage of North Korea ever shot. If that's a stunt, then I'll keep on doing stunts until I die."
Author: Shane Smith

45. "To call something an 'enhanced interrogation technique' doesn't alter the fact that we thought it was torture when the Japanese used it on American prisoners, we thought it was torture when the North Koreans used it, we thought it was torture when the Soviets used it. You know, it's almost the moral equivalent of saying that rape is an enhanced seduction technique."
Author: Ted Koppel

46. "We have treated our most serious adversaries, such as Iran and North Korea, in the most juvenile manner - by giving them the silent treatment. In so doing, we have weakened, not strengthened, our bargaining position and our leadership."
Author: Theodore C. Sorensen

47. "40 percent of North Korean children suffer from stunted growth. 20 percent are underweight."
Author: Tom Lantos

48. "East Asia has prospered since the end of the Vietnam War, and Northeast Asia has prospered since the end of the Korean War in a way that seems unimaginable when you think of the history of the first half of the century."
Author: William Kirby

49. "With regard to North Korea, between myself and President Obama earlier, with regard to the so-called launch of satellite, the missile launch, we shared the view that it undermines the efforts of the various countries concerned to achieve the resolution through dialogue."
Author: Yoshihiko Noda

50. "Satellite images suggest North Korea is building a light-water reactor and working on uranium enrichment. This is troubling."
Author: Yukiya Amano

North Korea Quotes Pictures