Lee Hyeon-seo Quotes

My parents fled from North Korea during the Korean War because they despised the North Korean Communist regime. They fled to seek freedom and came to South Korea.

Furthermore, they were constantly informed by all the camp authorities that they had been abandoned by the world: they were beggars and lucky to receive the daily soup of starvation.

In the last camp they all ate grass, until the authorities forbade them to pull it up. They were accustomed to having the fruits of their little communal gardens stolen by the guards, after they had done all the work; but at the last camp everything was stolen.

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.

Hitler is living on the empty stomach of Germany …. Better political insight has a hard time winning as long as there is little prospect of filling the stomach.

You do not have people with placards out in the street on North Korea. I mean, that is a disgusting regime. The people are kept in a form of slavery, 23 million of them, and no one protests!

Heavy rents which are become so great a burden to us that we are not scarcely able to bear. Between landlord and rectors, the very marrow is screwed out of our bones ….They have reduced us to such a deplorable state by such grievous oppressions that the poor is turned black in the face … and they are rendered incapable to support their starving families … that they have not even food, nor raiment to secure them from the extremes of weather.

I've been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.

I do not believe that the hungry man should be treated as subversive for expressing his suffering.

I left home because I was hungry.

The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea's alternate reality.

The next summer, 1794, corn grew dear, and distress began in our land.

40 percent of North Korean children suffer from stunted growth. 20 percent are underweight.

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.

If there is a spot where you have dictatorship, where people are not free, people are not satisfied, they do not find food and shelter, they are under the poverty level, this is a dangerous spot for the whole world, because those people will move, and they will move to different places. They will be carrying bad feelings towards others.

Up until the end of the Bush Administration, there was indifference to the North Korean suffering under Kim Jong-Il.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

We must do all we can to help improve the deplorable human rights situation of the North Korean people.

It's not natural disasters that are to blame for the deprivation of the North Korean people, but the failed policies of Kim Jong Il.

I worry about Zimbabweans. They bend, they bend, they bend, they bend - where do the people break? How long can they go on scrounging for food in garbage dumps and using the moisture from sewage drains to plant vegetables?

In 1843, everybody was hungry, unemployed, and conditions were very bad.

I have stopped at farm after farm where lean, underfed women and sickly men repeated again and again the same story—little food and no opportunity to get more.

England seizes our food whilst death seizes on our people.

How fared the Irish artisan—how fared the Irish peasant? Where one pined, as he yet pines, in your beggared cities, the other starves, upon your fruitful soil.

On my way back to Missouri I stopped in St Louis and I saw my first bread line – 200 starving men forming a gray line as they waited for food. The sight of them disturbed me.