Lee Hyeon-seo Quotes

To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste but is bitter and unforgettable.

Nondemocratic regimes imperil the security of the world. They stay in power by controlling their populations. This control invariably requires an increasing amount of repression. To justify this repression and maintain internal stability, external enemies must be manufactured.

You agreed with the Dear Leader or you died or ended up in Camp 913.

Political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative.

A totalitarian power is mainly busy in keeping itself alive.

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.'

One of the reasons why Gadafy's dictatorship has managed to remain in power for so long is not just because it has shown itself to be able to exact a great deal of violence, both psychological and physical, on its people, but because it has been very successful at imposing a narrative, a story.

I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.

I grew up in a dictatorship in East Africa.

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.

It is well known that in the Communist countries, and especially in my own, Albania, readers were often called upon to demonstrate their vigilance by detecting and denouncing the 'errors' of authors.

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the '30s, East Germany in the '50s, Czechoslovakia in the '60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the '70s, China in the '80s and '90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

Fig leaves of democratic procedure … hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship

Than Shwe ordered the confiscation of all cell phones and laptops and computers so no reportage could come out of Burma. It seemed clear that a demon, something diabolical, rather than something compassionate and human was in charge of Burma.

The U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian state in which judges and prosecutors were controlled by the ruling party. The result was injustice, oppression and corruption.

This is how dictatorships always behave: they deny reality; they deny crises.

The cadence of life is slower in North Korea.

The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.

Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state.

Unfortunately, writing and reporting the truth is not allowed under Castro's tyrannical dictatorship.

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

Having spent the greater part of my life under a Communist dictatorship, I am very familiar with the Bolshevik mentality according to which an author in general, and an eminent author in particular, is always guilty, and must be punished accordingly.

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.