Koreans

A

• The people are well built and strong, as a rule. They are a loyal, contented race, not grasping, and rather too easy in disposition. They are intelligent and learn with great ease. Possessed of many characteristics in common with their neighbors, the Chinese and Japanese, they yet seem to have a personality indicative of a different parentage, which continually calls forth inquiry as to their origin. In some slight degree they resemble the aborigines of America, and it is believed that their ancestors came from the north:—the question opens up a fertile field for study. Their written records are said to date back three thousand years.
  • Horace Newton Allen, Korean Tales (1889)

B

• Koreans can often view the world through a nationalistic lens and they will feel a sense of responsibility [for crimes committed by other Koreans].
  • Michael Breen, as quoted in "South Koreans Told To Fast Over Massacre" (20 April 2007), Telegraph, United Kingdom

• Koreans are an impatient people and yearn to be as good as they imagine advanced peoples to be. But they are too hard on themselves when their country falls short in their own eyes.
  • Michael Breen, The New Koreans: The Story of a Nation (2017), New York: St. Martin's Press, p. 6

• [F]eelings, I'd already noticed among my Korean friends, were not something to be kept in check by reason. They were justification for whatever came out of your mouth or made you swing your fist.
  • Michael Breen, The New Koreans: The Story of a Nation (2017), New York: St. Martin's Press, p. 13

• Countries are different, but people are people, and the Koreans are the same as anyone else. Their rise out of poverty in the face of such circumstances to democratic capitalism underlines the theme of our age.
  • Michael Breen, The New Koreans: The Story of a Nation (2017), New York: St. Martin's Press, p. 16

• If Descartes had been Korean, he would have said: "I am in charge, therefore I am."
  • Michael Breen, The New Koreans: The Story of a Nation (2017), New York: St. Martin's Press, p. 48

C

• Koreans are under enormous pressure to succeed at work, school and in relationships, and to care for their families, fueling an abysmal suicide rate that is the highest in the OECD group of developed countries. About 40 Koreans commit suicide every day, making it the nation's fourth-highest cause of death in 2012. The relentlessness of these tragedies may be numbing, but the nation was shocked last week when a 29-year-old reality show contestant, in a bathroom at the guesthouse where filming was taking place, hanged herself by a hairdryer cord.
  • Geoffrey Cain, "Why South Koreans are killing themselves in droves: Suicide represents the nation's fourth-leading cause of death. Cultural mores offer an explanation why" (15 March 2014), Salon

F

• What Maclean had witnessed was just one episode in a vast programme of ethnic deportation that modern historians have only recently rediscovered. On October 29, 1937, Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, wrote to inform Vyacheslav Molotov, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, that all Koreans in the Soviet Far East - a total of 171,781 people - had been deported to Central Asia, the consummation of plans first contemplated in the mid-1920s as a way of securing the Soviet Union's eastern frontier. Koreans were only the first ethnic group to come under suspicion. Balkars, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Germans, Greeks, Ingushi, Meskhetians, Kalmyks, Karachai, Poles and Ukrainians - all these different nationalities were subjected to persecution by Stalin at various times.
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 215

I

• [A]t the time Japan annexed Korea in 1910, the actual conditions of life in the peninsula were extremely bad. This was not due to any lack of inherent intelligence and ability in the Korean race, but to the stupidity and corruption which had characterized the government of the Korean dynasty, and to the existence of a royal court which maintained a system of licensed cruelty and corruption throughout Korea. Such was the misrule under which the Koreans had suffered for generation after generation that all incentive to industry and social progress had been destroyed because none of the common people had been allowed to enjoy the fruits of their own efforts.
  • Alleyne Ireland, The New Korea (1926)

M

• The magnificence of the courage and fortitude of the Korean people defies description. They have chosen to risk death rather than slavery. Their last words to me were: "Don't scuttle the Pacific!"
  • Douglas MacArthur, farewell address (1951)

• Koreans in general are very generous about misrepresentations when it’s another Korean doing the misrepresenting.
  • Brian Reynolds Myers, as quoted in "The Remarkable B.R. Myers Revealed" (29 May 2005), by Sun-jung Kim, Joong-Ang Daily

• South Korean nationalism is something quite different from the patriotism toward the state that Americans feel. Identification with the Korean race is strong, while that with the Republic of Korea is weak... Koreans in both the North and the South tend to cherish the myth that of all peoples in the world, they are the least inclined to premeditated evil.
  • Brian Reynolds Myers, "South Korea's Collective Shrug" (27 May 2010), The New York Times, New York: The New York Times Company

• In Germany, it's, let's say it's 5:59 and you're heading for the bakery or whatever and it's due to close at 6. The German will walk right up to that door and close it right in your face, they will lock it on the other side of that glass door with a shrug, like "sorry". A Korean would never do that, ever. And, and this is what I like about them.
  • Brian Reynolds Myers, interview with Colin Marshall (February 2015)

• Koreans are wonderfully tolerant of a foreigner with differing views when the discussion is in Korean, and no foreigners of importance are around. They lose their tempers when they see someone exporting information which — however widely discussed in the Korean press — is thought best kept "in country."
  • Brian Reynolds Myers, "Portrait of the Ally as an Intermediary" (23 March 2018), Sthele Press

• I see aspiring K-Pop singers crying on TV because they have to rehearse a lot. But they say northern Koreans were a tougher bunch even in the Chosun Dynasty.
  • Brian Reynolds Myers, "And Then What? (Again)" (3 June 2022), Sthele Press

N

• We got used to dividing the world into industrialized countries and developing countries – rich and poor. However, four East Asian tigers would soon disrupt our worldview. The British colony of Hong Kong and the city-state of Singapore did the opposite of all other countries, and opened their economies wide, without trade barriers. The experts claimed that free trade would knock out the small manufacturing sectors they had, but, on the contrary, they industrialized at a record pace and shocked the outside world by becoming even richer than the old colonial master, Britain. Taiwan and South Korea learned from this and began to liberalize their economies with amazing results. Their rapid growth took them from being some of the poorest countries in the world to some of the richest in a few generations. It was a global wake-up call because it was so easy to compare what the Chinese in Taiwan achieved compared to the Chinese in Mao’s China, and what the Koreans in the capitalist south created compared to the Koreans in the communist north. In the mid-1950s, Taiwan was only marginally richer than China. In 1980, it was four times richer. In 1955, North Korea was richer than South Korea. (The north was, after all, where mineral resources and power generation were located when the country was partitioned.) Today, South Korea is twenty times richer than North Korea.
  • Johan Norberg, The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World (2023)

O

• "Oh, no, they really do all look alike,"–the same Blackglgama hair, the same high-boned pie-plate face, the same tea-stain complexion, the same sharp-focused look in 1 million identical anthracite eyes. They are a strange northern people who came to this mountain peninsula an ice age ago... They don't like anyone who isn't Korean, and they don't like each other all that much, either. They're hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough little bastards, "the Irish of Asia".
  • P. J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This?" (1988), New York: Grove Press. p. 45