Lee Hyeon-seo Quotes

In North Koreans, the moment we are born, we don't know there's another life existing outside of our country. The regime always told us all the bad things about the outside world, describing America as full of thieves, all human scum, beggars, everyday people dying on the streets and hospitals.

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.

My mom told me many times how I need to be careful living inside the regime. We didn't say 'the regime.' We didn't even say 'North Korea.'

The North Korean regime really can control people. I think they are the best dictator in the whole planet.

Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.

With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

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

No section of the American populace has been more completely deceived by the forces interested in keeping the truth from the people than America's youth.

People are dumb, People are dumb, Promise ‘em peace and kingdom come. / People are dopes, People are dopes, Play on their peeves, play on their hopes. / Make ‘em feel mad, Make ‘em feel mad, Everything’s lousy, everything’s bad. / Make ‘em afraid, Make ‘em afraid, Show ‘em they’re dupes, tricked and betrayed. / Then if they bite, Then if they bite, You will have fools to fight your fight.

The Big Lie: Hitler Invented It. Stalin Perfected It. Nixon Uses It.

We live in a sea of semantic disorder in which old labels no longer faithfully describe. Police states are called "people's democracies." Armed conquest of free people is called "liberation.

Propaganda is bad when it comes from the enemy. It is good when it comes from us.

The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

We were taught North Korea is a heaven. They told us how people in western countries die in hospital or have no money to study in school.

If you can make people believe lies are the facts, then you can control them.

Because North Korea was so totally cut off, we didn't hear anything of the outside world. We had only one TV channel, which showed only propaganda, and we believed everything.

I am particularly horrified by the use of propaganda and the manipulation of the truth and the revision of history.

If you've lived in a dictatorship for thirty years, you're used to people lying to you.

All it takes is one generation to brainwash a population and convince them that reality doesn't exist

Everything you see in North Korea, it's all propaganda, but it's all connected to the volcano.

Pick the topic you like: the Middle East, international terrorism, Central America, whatever it is - the picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies. It's all been a marvelous success from the point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom, which is extremely interesting. It's not like a totalitarian state, where it's done by force. These achievements are under conditions of freedom.

The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually, the three philosophies are barely distinguishable.

One of the problems of truth being censored for a really long time is that people lose the ability to intuit what truth might be, and therefore begin to swallow whatever they're fed. I think that's something that the Chinese have learned very well. They've even managed to persuade quite large segments of the population that the martyrs of Tiananmen were actually an anti-national element. People don't view them as heroes, they see them as troublemakers. There you have a combination of censorship of truth creating a new truth, which is the lie, but it's not seen as such.

It's very enigmatic because of course, the population [of North Korea] has no contact with the world outside or it's very, very limited. They don't have any telephone connections, no radio, no TV, no movies, no newspapers - nothing from the outside world. This is very strange and there's the very strict, unifying government that forces you to be in step. You see it in the stadium where the spectators create, by flipping cards, an image of the dear leader, or of the volcano, and it's made of a 100,000 human pictures.