Quotes from Park Yeon-mi

Going to Columbia, the first thing I learned was 'safe space.' Every problem, they explained us, is because of white men.

In restaurants, when people order food - and they have menus - I hate that. Just give me something to eat. Quantity matters, not quality.

North Korea is a religion. We are told that Kim is a god and that he knows what you are thinking and how many hairs are on your head. It is the only country which talks about 'thought crime' - even thinking is a crime.

If there is no word that means you don't have the concept. In North Korea they eliminate the words: depression, stress, dictatorship, human rights. You cannot think of those. That's why all the brainwashing was possible.

I didn't know what freedom was. I didn't even know the word. I didn't know the concept. I never heard of that word, 'freedom.' To me, the happiest thing was having food.

I mean I could not trust men again. I hated men. I hated humanity. How on earth can people sell each other?

There were stereotypes: you are from the communist country so you are not a hard worker. You talk awkwardly and speak with an accent and you don't have any high education like us so you are basically stupid. And I am shorter than South Koreans - I was malnourished when I was young. It made me believe I was a loser.

My favorite movies were 'Titanic,' 'James Bond' and 'Pretty Woman' - people smuggled in pirate copies from China.

Kim Jong-un and the regime don't just oppress - they play with human lives.

I am an ambitious person. In the West, being ambitious isn't a bad thing. You work hard and you have a purpose in life. But in North Korea, you can never be individualistic. You can never live for yourself. You have to live for the regime.

In North Korean culture, love is a shameful thing and nobody talked about it in public. The regime was not interested in human desires and love stories were banned.

In North Korea, it was actually an oppressive regime and that's why I escaped with my life.

All the foreign movies we saw about love affected me and my generation. Now we no longer want to die for the regime, we want to die for love.

I was born at the end of the 1993. The regime stopped giving food to the people. Three million people died from 1995 to 1998. It's one of the world's worst man-made famines in history.

North Korea publicly denounced me as an enemy of my people and punished all my relatives. They have this guilty by association policy and they go after three generations of your family or up to eight generations of your family.

I learnt about the universe. I learnt about human rights and human dignity - this was so new to me.

I thought America was different, but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.

People would ask me about my hobbies and what I liked. I had never been asked those questions because what I thought didn't matter. I didn't know what a hobby was. In North Korea we used 'we,' and to say - 'I like this,' - was the worst thing you could say.

If I keep silent, I am betraying my people.

I can't say if I enjoy the attention or not. It's really exhausting. But every speech and every interview is extremely important to me because it could be my last one.

I was living in the border area with China, in Hyesan City. But after my father was imprisoned for informal trading, I escaped to China.

I didn't know it was even possible to sell humans. I thought people can only sell animals, chickens. But I didn't even know that kind of concept - human traffic - can be exist in the world. So I just couldn't process it when I heard it.

I know the truth of North Korea. The oppression and their tragedy. It cannot be silenced.

I never used a translator, never thought that the journalists might not understand.