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Kim Il-sung
Kim Jong-il was the son of Kim Il-sung and the leader of North Korea from his father’s death in 1994 until his own demise in 2011. When Kim Jong-il took control of the country, North Korea was already in the throes of a severe food shortage. But under his corrupt leadership, which continued to demonize commerce and hammer home the importance of isolationist politics, the country found itself in a full-blown famine. Estimates suggest that millions of North Koreans lost their lives over the course of Kim Jong-il’s reign. Though the regime insisted the people revere him as a Christlike or godlike figure—the perfect son of his perfect father—many North Koreans saw Kim Jong-il as responsible for the scarcity and starvation that came to define their lives and held him in much lower esteem than they had his father. Kim Jong-il was notorious for his crackdowns on desperate people who turned to the black market to make money or attempted to defect, throwing more and more citizens into labor camps and gulags. Kim Jong-il purged the country’s military to weed out those who were lenient about surveilling and punishing merchants, defectors, and ordinary citizens who accidentally or purposefully leaked anti-state sentiment. Demick depicts Kim Jong-il as a ruthless leader determined to live up to—and even overshadow—his father’s legacy, even as he ignored his people’s suffering in pursuit of consolidating absolute power.
Kim Jong-il Quotes in Nothing to Envy
The Nothing to Envy quotes below are all either spoken by Kim Jong-il or refer to Kim Jong-il. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
The red letters leap out of the gray landscape with urgency. They march across the fields, preside over the granite cliffs of the mountains, punctuate the main roads like mileage markers, and dance on top of railroad stations and other public buildings.
LONG LIVE KIM IL-SUNG.
KIM JONG-IL, SUN OF THE 21ST CENTURY.
LET’S LIVE OUR OWN WAY.
WE WILL DO AS THE PARTY TELLS US.
WE HAVE NOTHING TO ENVY IN THE WORLD.
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Chapter 12
Quotes
"The food problem is creating anarchy," Kim Jong-il complained in a December 1996 speech delivered at Kim Il-sung University. […] As well as any of the world's strongmen, he understood perfectly the cliché that an absolutist regime needs absolute power. Everything good in life was to be bequeathed by the government. He couldn't tolerate people going off to gather their own food or buying rice with their own money. "Telling people to solve the food problem on their own only increases the number of farmers' markets and peddlers. In addition, this creates egoism among people, and the base of the party's class may come to collapse.”
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Get the entire Nothing to Envy LitChart as a printable PDF.
Kim Jong-il Quotes in Nothing to Envy
The Nothing to Envy quotes below are all either spoken by Kim Jong-il or refer to Kim Jong-il. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
The red letters leap out of the gray landscape with urgency. They march across the fields, preside over the granite cliffs of the mountains, punctuate the main roads like mileage markers, and dance on top of railroad stations and other public buildings.
LONG LIVE KIM IL-SUNG.
KIM JONG-IL, SUN OF THE 21ST CENTURY.
LET’S LIVE OUR OWN WAY.
WE WILL DO AS THE PARTY TELLS US.
WE HAVE NOTHING TO ENVY IN THE WORLD.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12
Quotes
"The food problem is creating anarchy," Kim Jong-il complained in a December 1996 speech delivered at Kim Il-sung University. […] As well as any of the world's strongmen, he understood perfectly the cliché that an absolutist regime needs absolute power. Everything good in life was to be bequeathed by the government. He couldn't tolerate people going off to gather their own food or buying rice with their own money. "Telling people to solve the food problem on their own only increases the number of farmers' markets and peddlers. In addition, this creates egoism among people, and the base of the party's class may come to collapse.”
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
