Park Yeon-mi Quotes

Park Yeon-mi

Profession : Activist

Birth : October 4, 1993

I thought Kim Jong Il was a god who could read my mind. I thought his spirit never dies, and I never thought he was a normal human being.

Park Yeon-mi

I just never learned to think critically.

Park Yeon-mi

I mean I could not trust men again. I hated men. I hated humanity. How on earth can people sell each other?

Park Yeon-mi

Going to Columbia, the first thing I learned was 'safe space.' Every problem, they explained us, is because of white men.

Park Yeon-mi

I thought North Koreans were the only people who hated Americans, but turns out there are a lot of people hating this country in this country.

Park Yeon-mi

I have visited slums in Mumbai, I have visited slums in other countries, but nothing is like North Korea because North Korean starvation, it's a systematic starvation by a country that chose to starve us.

Park Yeon-mi

North Korea spends billions of dollars to make this nuke test system. If they would spend just 20 percent of what they spent on making nuclear weapons, nobody would have to die in North Korea from hunger but the regime chose to make us hungry.

Park Yeon-mi

I had to look for food all the time. I had to catch dragonflies, grasshoppers, and that was the only source of protein for me.

Park Yeon-mi

I really had loving parents, and my father was the example of perseverance... he never gave up, and he taught me it's so easy to give up, but to fight is harder.

Park Yeon-mi

I had to be very unrealistic about my situation. If I was so realistic I would never have made it this far. So, you just sometimes have to be hopeful for no reason.

Park Yeon-mi

I do want to go home. That's my dream. North Korea is still my home.

Park Yeon-mi

I never used a translator, never thought that the journalists might not understand.

Park Yeon-mi

I think my father would have become a millionaire if he had grown up in South Korea or the United States... Almost anywhere else, business would have been my father's vocation. But in North Korea, it was simply a means to survive.

Park Yeon-mi

Freedom meant for me to wear earrings, not freedom of speech.

Park Yeon-mi

North Korea publicly denounced me as an enemy of my people and punished all my relatives. They have this guilty by association policy and they go after three generations of your family or up to eight generations of your family.

Park Yeon-mi

I was born at the end of the 1993. The regime stopped giving food to the people. Three million people died from 1995 to 1998. It's one of the world's worst man-made famines in history.

Park Yeon-mi

Most North Korean people have never seen a map of the world. They don't even know that the Internet exists. They don't even have electricity.

Park Yeon-mi

There is a holocaust going on in my country, the world needs to acknowledge that and do something to help the people of North Korea.

Park Yeon-mi