Aung San Suu Kyi Quotes

Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free men and women are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society.

My top priority is for people to understand that they have the power to change things themselves.

The education and empowerment of women throughout the world cannot fail to result in a more caring, tolerant, just and peaceful life for all.

If ideas and beliefs are to be denied validity outside the geographical and cultural bounds of their origin, Buddhism would be confined to north India, Christianity to a narrow tract in the Middle East and Islam to Arabia.

There is a special charm to journeys undertaken before daybreak in hot lands: the air is soft and cool and the coming of dawn reveals a landscape fresh from the night dew.

Some of the most relaxing weekends I have ever enjoyed were those I spent quietly with a sense of all work to date completed, and an absorbing mystery.

Every thought, every word, and every action that adds to the positive and the wholesome is a contribution to peace. Each and every one of us is capable of making such a contribution.

Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps the more precious thing is the courage acquired through endeavor, courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions, courage that could be described as 'grace under pressure'- grace which is renewed repeatedly in the face of harsh, unremitting pressure.

In one of her letters she writes: Some have questioned the appropriateness of talking about such matters as metta (loving-kindness) and thissa (truth) in the political context. But politics is about people and what we had seen … proved that love and truth can move people more strongly than any form of coercion.

Moulmein for food,
Mandalay for conversation,
Rangoon for ostentation

While there is wisdom in refraining from implementing change merely for the sake of change, clinging to old ways solely for the sake of their antiquity is obviously equally futile.

"To be kind is to respond with sensitivity and human warmth to the hopes and needs of others. Even the briefest touch of kindness can lighten a heavy heart. Kindness can change the lives of people"
~ Aung Sun Suu Kyi

But even amid such stirring events, those two scourges of Burmese politics, factionalism and jealousy, began to cast their shadow.

I do not hold to non-violence for moral reasons, but for practical and political reasons, because I think it’s best for the country. And even Ghandiji, who is supposed to be the father of non-violence, said that between cowardice and violence, he’d choose violence any time.

In spite of the open, laughing face that the Burmese presented to the world, the ingrained, if inarticulate, conviction of their own nationhood prevented them from truly admitting those they saw as ‘foreign’ into their inner sancturns.