This month's entry is mostly quotes from Nothing to Envy, because that book is mind-blowing. Enjoy!
“If your view of the world is
that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself
up for a life of frustration and confusion. You’ll find yourself continually
debating people and never winning except in your own mind. Few things are as
destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly
rational.”
-Scott Adams
"By the hoary hosts of
Hoggoth- let magic reign!"
-Dr. Strange (Some 1960's issue)
"I managed to tread on a
shoe store full of toes when I commanded SEAL Team Six."
-Richard Marcinko, Rogue Warrior
II: Red Cell
"I have decided to start my
own five-year plan. All that is necessary is for me to find out just what a
five-year plan is."
"Next to a shot of some
good, habit-forming narcotic, there is nothing like traveling alone as a
'builder-upper.'"
"If an expert suddenly finds
out that he isn't entirely expert, he just isn't anything at all. And that sort
of thing gets a man down."
"For quite some time now I
have been worried about (among other things) my lethargy in the face of the
important fiction of the day. I begin a novel by some new master of English
prose, then turn ahead to find out how many pages there are going to be, and,
when I start reading again, imagine my surprise to find that I have already
skipped half the book! By then it is time to get up and go across the room for
something, and the book gets lost."
-Robert Benchley
"Let's sing the crippling
song together."
-HORSE the Band
"To do nothing is the
hardest job of all."
-The Crown
"If I speak at one constant
volume, at one constant pitch, at one constant rhythm, right into your ear, you
still won't hear. You still won't hear. You still won't hear. You still won't
hear. You still won't hear. You still won't hear."
-Faith No More, "A Small
Victory"
“If I had my life to live over
again, I would focus on the getting and eating of ice cream.”
“If you’re ever feeling poorly
about yourself, about your lack of achievement, your utter inconsequentiality,
your ridiculous little life lived in the shadows—take a moment and write some
Internet reviews of other people’s work.”
-Bob Odenkirk, A Load of Hooey
“North Korea invites parody. We
laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people. But
consider that their indoctrination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour
days spent in factory day-care centers; that for the subsequent fifty years,
every song, film, newspaper article, and billboard was designed to deify Kim
Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that
might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung's divinity. Who could possibly resist?”
“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.”
“As her students were dying, she
was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean.”
“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.”
“But now she couldn’t deny what
was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in
North Korea.”
“Under a system that sought to
stamp out tainted blood for three generations, the punishment would extend to
parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins. A lot of
people felt if you had one life to give, you would give it to get rid of this
terrible regime, but then you're not the only one getting punished. Your family
would go through hell.”
“The cadence of life is slower in
North Korea. Nobody owned a watch.”
“North Korean defectors often
find it hard to settle down. It is not easy for somebody who’s escaped a
totalitarian country to live in the free world. Defectors have to rediscover
who they are in a world that offers endless possibilities. Choosing where to
live, what to do, even which clothes to put on in the morning is tough enough
for those of us accustomed to making choices; it can be utterly paralyzing for
people who’ve had decisions made for them by the state their entire lives.”
“In North Korea, you don’t own
your own home; you are merely awarded the right to live there.”
“It is axiomatic that one death
is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. So it was for Mi-ran. What she didn't
realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to
get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To
avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring.”
“The more there was to complain
about, the more important it was to ensure that nobody did.”
“Supervisors routinely fabricated
statistics on agricultural production and industrial output because they were
so fearful of telling their own bosses the truth. Lies were built upon lies,
all the way to the top, so it is in fact conceivable that Kim Il-sung himself
didn't know when the economy crashed”
“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.”
“When outsiders stare into the
void that is today’s North Korea, they think of remote villages of Africa or
Southeast Asia where the civilizing hand of electricity has not yet reached. But
North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out
of the developed world. You can see the evidence of what once was and what has
been lost dangling overhead alongside any major North Korean road — the
skeletal wires of the rusted electrical grid that once covered the entire
country.”
“Listening to South Korean
television was like looking in the mirror for the first time in your life and
realizing you were unattractive.”
“If North Koreans paused to
contemplate the obvious inconsistencies and lies in what they were told, they
would find themselves in a dangerous place. They didn't have a choice. They
couldn't flee their country, depose their leadership, speak out, or protest. In
order to fit in, the average citizen had to discipline himself not to think too
much.”
“...the strength of the regime
came from its ability to isolate its own citizens completely.”
"Inside the city, he noted
the unusually large number of people squatting in a position that is almost
emblematic of North Korea, knees bent up to the chest, balancing on the balls
of the feet. 'In other places in the world people are always doing something,
but here they were just sitting.' It is a North Korean phenomenon that many
have observed. For lack of chairs or benches, the people sit for hours on their
haunches, along the sides of roads, in parks, in the market. They stare
straight ahead as though they are waiting- for a tram, maybe, or a passing car?
A friend or relative? Maybe they are waiting for nothing in particular, just
waiting for something to change."
-Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy:
Ordinary Lives in North Korea
-Compiled by Phony McFakename
