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

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

• 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

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