A Quote by Ban Ki-moon

As a child growing up during the Korean War, I knew poverty. I studied by candlelight. — © Ban Ki-moon
As a child growing up during the Korean War, I knew poverty. I studied by candlelight.
When I grew up, in Taiwan, the Korean War was seen as a good war, where America protected Asia. It was sort of an extension of World War II. And it was, of course, the peak of the Cold War. People in Taiwan were generally proAmerican. The Korean War made Japan. And then the Vietnam War made Taiwan. There is some truth to that.
When I was six, the Korean War broke out, and all the classrooms were destroyed by war. We studied under the trees or in whatever buildings were left.
I love Korean food, and it's kind of like home to me. The area that I grew up in outside Chicago, Glenview, is heavily Korean. A lot of my friends growing up were Korean and when I would eat dinner at their houses, their parents wouldn't tell me the names of the dishes because I would butcher the language.
As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.
Divorce is one of the key predictors of poverty for a child growing up in a home that's broken.
We're often overseas, and many people sing along with our songs in Korean and tell us proudly that they studied Korean. It makes me proud.
Well, we ought to make clear to everybody that the next Korean War, if one were ever to happen, is going to be the last Korean War because it's going to end with a unified peninsula, and it's go to be under Seoul, not Pyongyang.
With a book called 'Keeping Score,' I really did want to write a book about the Korean War, because I felt that it is the least understood war in the American cultural imagination. So I set out with the idea that Americans didn't know much about the Korean War and that I was going to try to fix a tiny bit of that.
One of the most durable successes of the war on poverty was to dramatically reduce the number of elderly poor in America. That's still true today. But, by contrast, child poverty has shot up over the last few years: A decade ago, about 16 percent of children in America were poor - which is a shockingly high percentage. But it's not as shocking as today, when we see that 22 percent of kids live in poverty.
I would have been a lot better off if I’d studied more when I was growing up, y’know. But you know where it all went wrong was the day they started the spelling bee. Because up until that day I was an idiot, but nobody else knew.
My dad was an alcoholic, growing up, so I knew how scary that was from a child's perspective - the volatility.
We think there are better solutions to fighting poverty because we see what the War on Poverty has produced. It produced tens of trillions of dollars in spending. It has been a 51-year exercise, and yet the poverty rates in America today are not much better than when we started the War on Poverty.
I was surrounded by music in my family, surrounded by people who sang songs - every single person I knew as a child growing up had one, two, three songs they knew from start to finish.
I watched a lot of documentaries about North Korean defectors. I also practiced speaking in a North Korean accent with a teacher, and studied a lot.
When I was growing up, I don't think I knew any other child who had been out of Sri Lanka.
I was a very quiet child growing up. I always knew that I was funny - I just never put it to use.
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