While Time Remains Quotes

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“When a people become untethered from history, when they become unshackled from reality, when they lose the ability to understand cause and effect, they become ripe for exploitation from those who hold real power.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“Even if I was “traumatized,” what would be the point of having survived it only to have to pay someone else to complain to about it, rather than turn it into something positive?”
― Jordan B. Peterson, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“Unwilling to take responsibility for any of these categories of national decline, American elites have resorted to insisting that all this is somehow the fault or responsibility of a particular political faction (almost always “conservatives” or “Republicans,” by which they simply mean “working-class” or “rural” or “white”), and that we must start banning certain books, censoring certain forms of speech, and kicking these “political enemies” off various free speech platforms. Meanwhile, these same American elites have been selling off their own country to China, spending decades shipping as many American jobs to China as possible, eroding America’s industrial and manufacturing base and supply chains, leaving the country vulnerable to”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“large segment of American society now believes that free speech is a public and private threat. The right to not feel offended, the right to be protected from unpleasant realities and difficult ideas, the right to feel safe from people who disagree with you—these are of course not rights at all, but they have come to supplant the legal rights enshrined in the First Amendment.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“[A]s the generation of the Great Depression and the world wars passes on, so does the memory of what it took to build the system of abundance that we enjoy today. As America becomes predominantly made up of people who didn't have a hand in building the system in the first place, it is producing more and more people who want to destroy the system because they don't understand it. They don't appreciate how fragile their freedom is, how precious their system of government, how rare their way of life. And so they entertain fantasies of tearing it down. In some cases, those fantasies are becoming reality.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“[T]he true aim of anticapitalism is not justice or social betterment -- it is to narrow the boundaries within which people are capable of thinking for themselves. The freedom that capitalism grants to individual human beings to think and act for themselves, thereby accumulating wealth, is the reason it is under increasing suspicion in America today.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“Right wing” is one of those terms of abuse I understood only after a number of my fellow Americans used it in a concerted and sometimes successful attempt to harass and censor me. In this context at least, I’ve learned that it does not refer to a set of social and economic preferences on the spectrum of American political possibilities. It means “disloyal”—disloyal to the tastes, opinions, values, and preferences of the financial, political, and cultural elite. The disloyalty of the lower and working classes to the ruling class.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“This one, narrow area of life—accommodations for people with disabilities—came to represent everything that I was learning to love about America: democracy, self-determination, civic participation, entrepreneurship, solidarity, and compassion. It was everything that my teachers and peers at Columbia would spend the next four years trying to convince me were lies.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times” was the bit of wisdom he shared with me (from the novel Those Who Remain, by G. Michael Hopf).”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“In America, however, the people railing against their own country are often overfed, or obsessed with intentionally limiting the amount of food they eat. Often they will “speak out” against American history, society, capitalism, and democracy on an American social-media platform from their American phone or computer, or on the campus of a world-class American university, or on the street with the permission of American government”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“How did we get to the point where American children and North Korean children are being fed fairly similar propaganda about the United States?”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“life. And so they entertain fantasies of tearing it down. In some cases, those fantasies are becoming reality.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“The threshold for being sent to a camp is almost comically low. If the authorities see that dust has gathered in the corners of a frame of a portrait of the Dear Leader—if a child is caught whistling a made-up tune that isn’t a government-approved song—three generations of a family can be rounded up, imprisoned, and shot, “to wipe out the seed of dissent.” The”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“It is the Earth’s longest-running experiment in deliberately managed human misery, a perpetual crime against God, an interminable violation of human dignity, a black mark on the human species so dark and deep that it can almost make you ashamed to be a part of it—that it can make the individual human beings incarcerated there spend the entirety of their short lives dreaming and daydreaming of living instead as a bird, or even a mouse.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“North Korea is a socialist state, a surviving vestige of the Marxist-Leninist dream of a communist culmination of human history: a nuclear-armed, totalitarian dictatorship that has enslaved 26 million human beings into a cult of personality around three evil men, two of them dead, who have overseen a country-sized concentration camp.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“The only hope for countering the spread of Chinese influence is the United States, but American elites are busy dismantling the sources of American economic and military power to the benefit of the Chinese in order to enrich themselves. If this process continues, there will simply be no hope for preventing a Chinese-dominated future for the world. Having come from North Korea, it is difficult to convey how depressing this all is. The horror of North Korea is Exhibit A of what a more Chinese world would look like: more unspeakable crime, more abject human suffering, more terrifying exploitation of innocent people for the benefit of a communist party cadre. Instead of ending the North Korean nightmare, Chinese hegemony promises only to spread the North Korean experience to more people around the world.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“At the end of the day, this is the object of cancel culture in America: to deprive people of the right or ability to express thoughts that run counter to official narratives, so that eventually, they won’t even know how. Threaten enough people with the destruction of their reputations and livelihoods if they criticize the wrong thing, and eventually they won’t even know how to criticize it.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“Our forefathers in America were willing to undergo such extreme conditions and assume such dangers—all for the sake of freedom of religion. That’s how precious they considered the basic freedoms of speech, expression, and conscience. They were willing to risk everything for it.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“What is preferable: a society in which there is great inequality between the average person, who makes $65,000 per year, and the top 1 percent, who make $500,000 per year—or a society in which everyone is equal… at an annual income of $4,000?”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“Stuck in their own self-made contradictions about current American life, from which they profit so handsomely, leftists tend to focus on the unalterable past as a way of perpetuating their own perceived victimhood and punishing their ideological opponents. Hence, a distant descendant of nineteenth-century African slaves who works at Goldman Sachs or studies at Harvard is a victim. The first-generation immigrant child of a twenty-”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“It was then that I realized what happiness is. It’s nothing other than a synonym for love and gratitude. Happiness is not material success or recognition or even comfort. It’s becoming a parent, being a good daughter, being a good friend, and lending a helping hand to anyone less fortunate. What this meant was that finding meaning in life was not an arduous search that may or may not end in gratification. Meaning, it turns out, is not difficult to find at all. As many wise people have pointed out, happiness is a choice. My mother once told me that”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among perilous isles yet sink not to the bottom.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“During the first day of orientation, an instructor from the general studies department asked a group of freshmen and transfer students if any of us had read and liked Jane Austen. I raised my hand eagerly, and said in my still somewhat broken English that I found her characters—created two centuries earlier—to be instantly relatable. “Wrong,” the instructor said. “Those books promote female oppression, racism, colonialism, and white supremacy.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“Again, to believe that the answers to social problems lie not in innovation, creativity, and a certain measure of personal and communal responsibility, but rather in the centralization of state power and the eradication of private ownership, is just a variation on the leftist theme of victimhood and oppression, which really only serves to mask the emergence and power of an oligarchy.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“It wasn’t just the friendliness of the people, who exude the confidence and openness of men and women living, worshiping, and loving as they please. It was the sense of excitement, of dynamism, a certain electricity in the air and in personal interactions. These were clearly the descendants, I thought, of those who overturned imperialism and slavery, defeated fascism and communism, invented motion pictures and jazz, eliminated diseases, created the internet, and landed on the moon. I knew then that I wanted to live with them, to call them my friends and family—even, if I could, to be one of them.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

“Thankfully, the brain does not have “a life of its own”—it is actually one of the most controllable organs in our bodies, as long as we’re aware of it.”
― Yeonmi Park, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America