People From New Jersey

"You should be proud of your profession because there's less lying in journalism than in any other profession. They lie in education, they lie in politics, they lie in banking, they lie in labor; there's liars all over the place. Sports? Full of liars. And there are liars in journalism, but if there are liars, journalism will out them."

"All the Way; All or Nothing at All. This is the Sicilian in Sinatra; he permits his friends, if they wish to remain that, none of the easy Anglo-Saxon outs. But if they remain loyal, then there is nothing Sinatra will not do in turn — fabulous gifts, personal kindnesses, encouragement when they're down, adulation when they're up. They are wise to remember, however, one thing. He is Sinatra. The boss. Il Padrone."

"I think most journalists are pretty lazy, number one. A little lazy and also they're spoon-fed information, such as the weapons of mass destruction back in 2003.... you have these people who create a package of news, develop it as a story line, a scenario, and they find, as Mailer once said about the press, that they're like a donkey. You have to feed the donkey. The donkey every day has to eat. So [special interests] throw information at this damn animal that eats everything. Tin cans, garbage."

"He is what in traditional Sicily have long been called uomini rispettati — men of respect: men who are both majestic and humble, men who are loved by all and are very generous by nature, men whose hands are kissed as they walk from village to village, men who would personally go out of their way to redress a wrong."

"He is a wholly unpredictable man of many moods and great dimension, a man who responds instantaneously to instinct — suddenly, dramatically, wildly he responds, and nobody can predict what will follow."

"It’s my reality, I put a Band-Aid on it and I move on."

"Lauren Manning has been very much front and center in my mind… Lauren writes that we may all in fact, we all will be touched by adversity as we go on our life’s journey, but we can refuse to be trapped by it."

"In just these last few years as President, I have watched the American people bounce back from... events [that] were heartbreaking... I think of Lauren Manning, the 9/11 survivor who had severe burns over 80 percent of her body, who said, ‘That’s my reality. I put a Band-Aid on it, literally, and I move on."

"It’s not about how strong you were back then, it is about how strong you are right here right now."

"All of us have been wounded in some way, whether by violence, disease or other personal tragedy. But though we can never pretend we have not been touched by adversity, we can refuse to be held by it."

"Every day you have a choice. Make it count."

"For years I've been privileged to receive words of thanks and encouragement from people all over the world, often simply asking how I'm doing. I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to share my story in the hope it will continue to resonate with people facing challenges in their own lives."

"I was asked by thousands of people if I was going to write a book. A lot of them had shared in my story, and in ways I don't quite understand, they had found it helpful."

"You say you are fighting for liberty. Yes you are fighting for liberty: liberty to keep four millions of your fellow-beings in ignorance and degradation;–liberty to separate parents and children, husband and wife, brother and sister;–liberty to steal the products of their labor, exacted with many a cruel lash and bitter tear;–liberty to seduce their wives and daughters, and to sell your own children into bondage;–liberty to kill these children with impunity, when the murder cannot be proven by one of pure white blood. This is the kind of liberty–the liberty to do wrong–which Satan, Chief of the fallen Angels, was contending for when he was cast into Hell."

"From the beginning I urged upon the Government, in the strongest terms, the enlistment of negro troops, the former slaves of the rebels, not only as adding to the number and efficiency of our own forces, but chiefly on account of its depriving the enemy of just so much labor in their fields."

"One of the few 'avowed anti-slavery officers in the army', Hunter had caused a huge commotion only a month before when he had announced unilaterally that all rebel-owned slaves under his jurisdiction were to be 'forever free.' Abraham Lincoln, who knew and liked Hunter, had sternly countermanded him; the president insisted that 'commanders in the field' could not make such decisions... Hunter envisioned a different result. He wanted former slaves to have voting rights... The old warrior could not have been happy at the ultimate outcome."

"The experiment of arming the blacks, so far as I have made it, has been a complete and marvellous success. They are sober, docile, attentive, and enthusiastic — displaying great natural capacities in acquiring the duties of the soldier. They are now eager beyond all things to take the field and be led into action; and it is the unanimous opinion of the officers who have had charge of them, that, in the peculiarities of this climate and country, they will prove invaluable auxiliaries — fully equal."

"The three States of Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, comprising the military department of the south, having deliberately declared themselves no longer under the protection of the United States of America, and having taken up arms against the said United States, it becomes a military necessity to declare them under martial law. This was accordingly done on the 25th day of April, 1862. Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible; the persons in these three States — Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina— heretofore held as slaves, are therefore declared forever free."

"Pyongyang watchers consider the regime to be so hungry for economic growth, progress and other goodies as to have no pride, no mission, and no commitment to victory, real victory. It's all eros and no thymos. On this error rests our administration's hope for denuclearization."

"[U]ntil the colonial period Korea had one of the world’s longest histories of centralized rule; that the ROK is about a quarter of Germany's size; and that the likelihood of Kim Jong Un devolving any of his power to mayors and governors is zero."

""What belongs together, is growing together again," Willy Brandt said in 1989. The formulation implies a more balanced and grass-rootsy process than actually ensued in Germany — or is likely to take place here. Koreans belong together and will someday grow back together. But if the South doesn’t take the upper hand in training and guiding that growth, the North will."

"North Korea kept harassing the South, and one day they just clicked: Tell me that isn't a stalker's dream writ geopolitical."

"No one ever said the regime’s legitimacy reposes in the nukes themselves. It rests on a commitment to the unyielding defense and unification of the Korean nation."

"Moon camp: You can talk as loudly as you want, and the Americans won’t pay the slightest attention. Least of all Trump. As far as they’re concerned, the North Koreans are communists, and you’re liberal democrats."

"If South Koreans want a league with the North, we Americans can only wish them well. The problem is that the current military alliance may embolden them to take this step without proper thought — and then embolden them to nullify the framework as soon as they sour on it. How the North is likely to respond can be imagined, considering the two deadly acts of aggression that followed the South’s abandonment of the Sunshine Policy in 2008."

"Korean nationalism has not only energized the North’s march to nuclear armament, but also exerted a growing appeal on people in the South — the ideological discourse of which republic has received even less attention than the North’s. The average American knows only that in the 1980s liberal democracy replaced authoritarianism here [in South Korea]."

"South 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.""

"[T]he next few months will decide the fate of the peninsula."

"Political science, by which I mean nothing more abstruse or academic than consideration of a foreign country as a country in its own right, seems to have been almost completely supplanted by a preoccupation with international relations. What is thought irrelevant to that side of things (often wrongly) is considered beneath notice. This can be seen by the reflexiveness with which journalists now contact I.R. professors or nuclear specialists for comment on North Korea’s motivations, party conferences, personality cult, etc — and the perfect confidence with which that comment is supplied.This is not to say that discussion of the current crisis does justice to international relations as a discipline. Usually it is conducted in a very simplistic, moralizing, America-centric fashion, with no apparent sense of history. Much of the stuff on Twitter or in op-ed pieces is all the more embarrassing for having been written from a presumed position of great intellectual superiority to Donald Trump. For all his unsuitedness to be president, the fellow is no more ignorant of North Korea’s political nature than most of his critics are."

"[W]hat more authoritative, trustworthy source could one ask for than the South Koreans? Whether Kim Dae Jung, Roh Moo Hyun or Moon Jae-in, the message to Washington has always been: "Trust us; we know these guys much better than you do.""

"[A]lthough the “far left” Justice Party is ostensibly in the opposition, 77% of those who support it say that President Moon is doing a good job."

"[S]tart by reading Pareto; elites routinely do things that in retrospect look politically suicidal."

"[N]o Blue House can win Pyongyang’s trust without distancing itself from the US ally to a significant degree. At the very least it must present itself as neutral in the nuclear stand-off, but even that probably isn't enough. As Chamfort said, "Anyone placed at exactly the same distance between yourself and your enemy will always appear closer to your enemy." The South Koreans can play go-between only if they restrict themselves to mediating with Washington on the North's behalf."

"The surrender of something attained heroically and at great cost — something to which the well-being of entire generations has been sacrificed — is far more dangerous to a government than not having it to begin with."

"[T]he peninsula flag means two very different things to the two Koreas. In the South it symbolizes a desire for peaceful co-existence, or at most for a unification of equal partners in the reassuringly remote future. In wall posters above the DMZ it has always symbolized the southern masses' yearning for "autonomous unification", meaning absorption by the North. It's worrying to think how inner-track propaganda is certain to misrepresent the South Koreans' eschewal of their state flag for this of all symbols — and at this of all events."

"[T]hose who haven’t yet grasped the ideological realities of the [Korean] peninsula probably never will."

"[S]ent this piece the other day to a few friends, I have decided to make it public in response to questions that journalists have been emailing me. Not that they will pay attention. Getting asked how Kim Jong Un is now going to sell denuclearization to the North Korean public — and asked in the tone of someone who expects it to happen — reminds me how futile it is to talk to a guild with no interest in ideological matters."

"By forbearing to march behind the yin-yang flag at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the South Korean athletes are making a bigger sacrifice than the North Koreans, in whose iconography the banner of the DPRK ranks lower than the party standard, which in turn ranks much lower than the Supreme Commander's standard, the flag of the personality cult."

"In divided Germany you had liberal democracy versus communism. In divided Korea it’s moderate versus radical Korean nationalism, a difference of degree inside one big ideological community. It’s a huge difference, of course, but moderates always feel a certain admiration for radicals in all ideologies and religions. This admiration has been reflected in movies here that show North Korean women as purer, more chaste, and North Korean men as more resolute, handsome, and cooler than their South Korean counterparts. This year we have seen North Korean defectors appear in films as criminals or even murderers, which is in line with how the local press has long treated defectors as bad elements."

"Journalism is the most Americanized of all professions, and nothing is more American than the belief that economic matters trump ideological ones. There is very little talk of ideology in coverage of any country. Western journalists here see a poor North facing off against a rich South and laugh at the notion that the former might have serious designs on the latter. They don’t seem aware of what I call the South’s state-loyalty deficit."

"Americans expect Seoul to play good cop to their bad cop. They assume the commonality of language, ethnicity and culture will help the South build trust with the North, so it can put the alliance’s demands over more persuasively. They also reckon the North Koreans will find it easier to yield to soft-spoken fellow Koreans than to the foreigners with whom they have been exchanging threats and insults for decades. But to play such a role the South must overcome an exceptionally high barrier of mistrust. It gets no brownie points for Koreanness alone. On the contrary; from the North’s standpoint it’s precisely that co-ethnicity which makes the puppet state’s long collusion with the Yankees so heinous."

"[O]ne's political ideology is inextricable from one's view of history."

"[A] common chant during the candlelight demonstrations here last year was “The people are above the constitution,” a statement most Americans would have a problem with. The very proposal of a North-South confederation runs counter to the South Korean constitution, which does not recognize the dictatorship in the North at all."

"[H]istorians are going to look back on the North Korean nuclear crisis, and wonder why it took us so long to see what was always staring us in the face. Here we have a rapidly arming country that keeps pledging to eliminate a rival state, which it invaded in 1950 and attacked twice only 7 years ago, and most Western observers still think it can’t possibly be serious. They believe it’s nuclearizing only to formalize a de facto security from American attack that its artillery, aimed squarely on this city, has afforded it for decades."

"South Korea has its most pacifist administration ever... [P]eople here [in South Korea] do not identify strongly with their state. No public holiday celebrates it, neither the flag nor the coat of arms nor the anthem conveys republican or non-ethnic values, no statues of presidents stand in major cities. Few people can even tell you the year in which the state was founded. When the average [South Korean] man sees the [South Korean] flag, he feels fraternity with [ethnic] Koreans around the world."

"[I]f Kim Il Sung had won the war, Korea today would not look like North Korea. I think it would still be a much less free and prosperous place than the South is now, but it would resemble China and Vietnam more than the North now does. Its system has been shaped by the need to distinguish itself, to seal itself off from the rival state, and to pursue nuclear armament."

"I have tried to draw attention to South Korea’s dangerous state-loyalty deficit, by which I mean citizens’ lack of a sense of identification with their republic. In doing so I have noted the obvious parallels with South Vietnam, another state fatally weakened by nationalism. On this point too, I seem to be talking to the wall. Even Americans interested in the nuclear crisis feel no need to learn about party politics in South Korea. It’s a thriving, prosperous democracy, and that’s all that matters."

"The example of East Germany exerts a far greater cautionary effect on the North Koreans than Qaddafi’s fate does. The Honecker regime took what Americans and South Koreans keep recommending to North Korea as the “pragmatic” way out of its problems: It began opening up to the West, quasi-formally recognized the rival coethnic state’s right to exist, and focused on improving its own citizens’ standard of living. We all know how that ended."

"[T]he establishment of a belligerent force’s intentions is always an urgently important matter in itself, regardless of how likely its ultimate victory may be, as America should have learned on December 7, 1941. As for the boundaries of our imagination being the boundaries of the possible, here’s another date: 9/11."

"The North wants unification under its own flag, while South Korean progressives want the two states to coalesce over decades of mutually beneficial economic cooperation."