Barbara Demick Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Tech-savvy types had figured out how to get around the system. With radios it was easy - open up the set, cut the conveyor belt attached to the dial, and replace it with a rubber band that could turn the dial wherever you liked. Television required a little more expertise.

Barbara Demick

#3. In North Korea, you don't own your own home; you are merely awarded the right to live there.

Barbara Demick

#4. He was polite, respectful, not daring even to hold Mi-ran's hand until they'd been dating for three years.

Barbara Demick

#5. Anybody with a functioning brain cannot not know that something is wrong.

Barbara Demick

#6. Since 2009, 140 Tibetans have immolated themselves to protest Chinese policies that limit their freedom of movement, speech and religion, especially their right to venerate the Dalai Lama.

Barbara Demick

#7. 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

#8. As a reader, I've always been interested in dystopian novels like 'Nineteen Eighty-four'.

Barbara Demick

#9. North Korea was (and remains as of this writing in 2009) the last place on earth where virtually everything is grown on collective farms. The state confiscates the entire harvest and then gives a portion back to the farmer.

Barbara Demick

#10. The cadence of life is slower in North Korea.

Barbara Demick

#11. Over the years, so many exceptions and amendments were made to China's one-child policy that it was hard to pinpoint a moment to pronounce it dead.

Barbara Demick

#12. Emotions somehow meant more when they were handwritten on precious scraps of paper and conveyed on slow trains running out of fuel.

Barbara Demick

#13. In 1995, the Chinese government picked a 6-year-old child to succeed the Panchen Lama, the second highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism.

Barbara Demick

#14. Liberty and love These two I must have. For my love I'll sacrifice My life. For liberty I'll sacrifice My love.

Barbara Demick

#15. The night sky in North Korea might be the most brilliant in northeast Asia, the only airspace spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent.

Barbara Demick

#16. I agree with Kathi Zellweger that sanctions mostly punish the ordinary people who live at the edge of starvation.

Barbara Demick

#17. The anti-Japanese resistance was as familiar a theme in North Korean cinema as cowboys and Indians was in early Hollywood.

Barbara Demick

#18. 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

#19. One of the ways the North Korea regime has kept power is by keeping its people ignorant of the living standards in the outside world. That's the underlying lie that supports the regime - not that their country is 'normal' but that they are better off.

Barbara Demick

#20. China's one-child policy was born in 1980, after years of less severe measures to discourage births. The Communist Party promised that the policy would be temporary.

Barbara Demick

#21. People have crossed the Himalayas in flip-flops seeking a blessing from the Dalai Lama.

Barbara Demick

#22. A coal miner from Chongjin whom I met in 2004 in China told me, People are not stupid. Everybody thinks our own government is to blame for our terrible situation. We all know we think that and we all know that everybody else thinks that. We don't need to talk about it.

Barbara Demick

#23. Kim Jong-un's style is more suggestive of Saddam Hussein or his murderous son, Uday Hussein.

Barbara Demick

#24. North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin.

Barbara Demick

#25. Often children came in with minor colds or coughs or diarrhea and then suddenly, they were dead.

Barbara Demick

#26. 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

#27. In the 1990s, the United States offered to help North Korea with its energy needs if it gave up its nuclear weapons programme.

Barbara Demick

#28. ...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

#29. We joked that unrequited, or in this case unconsummated, love affairs are the only ones that last forever.

Barbara Demick

#30. One death is a tragedy; a thousand is a statistic.

Barbara Demick

#31. Kim Jong Un came in as a fresh face, so I think there's a great disappointment that he's playing the same game as his father.

Barbara Demick

#32. Never mind Communist solidarity, China and the Soviet Union wanted to do business with the likes of Hyundai and Samsung, not with state-owned enterprises in the North that didn't pay their bills on time.

Barbara Demick

#33. For the 1,300 years prior to the Japanese occupation, Korea had been a unified country governed by the Chosun dynasty, one of the longest-lived monarchies in world history

Barbara Demick

#34. Charity begins with a full stomach," the North Koreans like to say; you can't feed somebody else's kids if your own are starving. When

Barbara Demick

#35. 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

#36. The Uighurs are a Turkic people more closely related to Uzbeks and Kazakhs than to Chinese.

Barbara Demick

#37. 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

#38. He would wait hours for her, maybe two or three. It didn't matter. The cadence of life is slower in North Korea. Nobody owned a watch.

Barbara Demick

#39. 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

#40. In 1949, Mao Tse-tung's Communists established the People's Republic of China, and the following year, his People's Liberation Army invaded central Tibet.

Barbara Demick

#41. In 1984, George Orwell wrote of a world where the only colour to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea. Images of Kim Il-sung are depicted in vivid colours. Rays of yellow and orange emanate from his face: he is the sun.

Barbara Demick

#42. Her younger son, twenty, was assigned to a factory that made railroad equipment, but since it provided no salary he was actually paying his workplace three dollars per month so he could stay home to help his mother with the pigs and moonshine.

Barbara Demick

#43. 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

#44. The scene that has raised the most objections in 'The Interview' is at the very end, when Kim's head dissolves into flames. To me, it feels gratuitous.

Barbara Demick

#45. Good reporting should have the same standard as in a courtroom - beyond a reasonable doubt.

Barbara Demick

#46. The more there was to complain about, the more important it was to ensure that nobody did.

Barbara Demick

#47. North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.

Barbara Demick

#48. punishment was withholding food. Starvation was the way the regime preferred to eliminate its opponents. It

Barbara Demick

#49. North Korea, under its thirtysomething Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, is no country for old men. The latest casualty in Kim's ongoing purge of the senior military command was the defense minister, Hyon Yong-chol, who reportedly committed the classic old man's offense of falling asleep in a meeting.

Barbara Demick

#50. Listening to South Korean television was like looking in the mirror for the first time in your life and realizing you were unattractive.

Barbara Demick

#51. North Korea is probably the only country in the world deliberately kept out of the Internet.

Barbara Demick

#52. When you work, you don't have time to do anything stupid. When you work ten hours a day, you forget everything. We have to forget. There is no looking back, only forward." In

Barbara Demick

#53. But now she couldn't deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

Barbara Demick

#54. The strength of the regime came from its ability to isolate its own citizens completely.

Barbara Demick

#55. In 2012, a five-year-old girl in Shandong province described to me how ten officials had chased her six-months-pregnant mother through the fields to prevent the birth of the family's second child, a boy. She died during the procedure.

Barbara Demick

#56. For a North Korean watcher, seeing 'The Interview' is like seeing an earnest endeavor reflected back through a freak-show mirror.

Barbara Demick

#57. At first, they would walk in silence, then their voices

Barbara Demick

#58. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement, named for an old Uighur name for Xinjiang, is a shadowy group that operates largely out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and is devoted to expelling the Chinese Communist Party from northwestern China.

Barbara Demick

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. If you look at satellite photographs of the Far East by night, you'll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Barbara Demick

#62. 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

#63. North Korea remains the last bastion of undiluted communism in the world.

Barbara Demick

#64. There was the natural human survival instinct to be optimistic.

Barbara Demick

#65. Televisions and radios are locked on government frequencies - it is a serious crime to listen to a foreign broadcast. As a result, North Koreans think that they live in the best country in the world and that, as difficult as their lives may be, everybody else has it much worse.

Barbara Demick

#66. As Mrs. Song would observe a decade later, when she thought back on all the people she knew who died during those years in Chongjin, it was the simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told
they were the first to die.

Barbara Demick

#67. (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

#68. By 2022, China is expected to cede the dubious distinction of being the world's most populous nation to India, according to the population division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

Barbara Demick

#69. By the mid-1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, broken, malfunctioning. The country had seen better days.

Barbara Demick

#70. 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

#71. Walking down the street with a portrait of the Dalai Lama will get one immediately arrested in most parts of China. Tiny medallions are routinely confiscated and destroyed.

Barbara Demick

#72. As her students were dying, she was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean.

Barbara Demick

#73. 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