People ask me about what sacrifices I've made. I always answer: I've made no sacrifices, I've made choices.
Aung San Suu KyiRead
My top priority is for people to understand that they have the power to change things themselves.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes individual empowerment and the ability to effect personal or societal change.
Aung San Suu Kyi encourages individuals to recognize their inherent strength and potential to initiate change in their lives and communities. This message underscores the importance of personal agency and responsibility, reminding us that transformative actions often begin from within, and that collective improvement starts with empowered individuals taking initiative.
In practice
In a motivational speech to inspire students during their graduation.
People ask me about what sacrifices I've made. I always answer: I've made no sacrifices, I've made choices.
The struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma is a struggle for life and dignity. It is a struggle that encompasses our political, social and economic aspirations.
This was the way I was brought up to think of politics, that politics was to do with ethics, it was to do with responsibility, it was to do with service, so I think I was conditioned to think like that, and I'm too old to change now.
If you want to bring an end to long-standing conflict, you have to be prepared to compromise.
Where there is no justice there can be no secure peace.
I felt that it was my duty not to senselessly waste my time. And since I didn't want to waste my time, I tried to accomplish as much as possible.
We are here to change the world with small acts of thoughtfulness done daily rather than with one great breakthrough.
The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.
When I was 15 years old in the tenth grade, I heard Martin Luther King, Jr. Three years later, when I was 18, I met Dr. King and we became friends. Two years after that I became very involved in the civil rights movement. I was in college at the time. As I got more and more involved, I saw politics as a means of bringing about change
If you look at a great city, one of its amazing features is that you're going to find all sorts of things that you might not specifically have chosen in advance. And they will change your day. Maybe your month. Maybe your whole life.
When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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