It takes courage to feel the truth, to feel one's conscience because once you do, you must engage your fundamental purpose for being alive. You can't just expect to sit idly by and have freedom handed to you.
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Aung San Suu Kyi
Leader of the National League for Democracy; Nobel Peace Prize laureate; State Counsellor of Myanmar, 2016–2021
Myanmar · b. 1945
Politics and public life
About
Burmese politician who co-founded the National League for Democracy and spent a total of fifteen years under house arrest. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 while detained; delivered the lecture in Oslo in 2012. Served as State Counsellor from 2016 until the 2021 military coup removed her from office again; international human-rights monitors documented abuses against the Rohingya during her tenure, which drew sustained criticism.
10 answers
Recorded · On the billboard
As you look at me and listen to me, please remember the often repeated truth that one prisoner of conscience is one too many.
To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity.
Of the sweets of adversity, and let me say that these are not numerous, I have found the sweetest, the most precious of all, is the lesson I learnt on the value of kindness.
Every kindness I received, small or big, convinced me that there could never be enough of it in our world. 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.
If I advocate cautious optimism it is not because I do not have faith in the future but because I do not want to encourage blind faith.
It is in human nature to contain both the positive and the negative. However, it is also within human capability to work to reinforce the positive and to minimize or neutralize the negative.
Can we afford to indulge in compassion fatigue? Is the cost of meeting the needs of refugees greater than the cost that would be consequent on turning an indifferent, if not a blind, eye on their suffering?
Long years ago, sometimes it seems many lives ago, I was at Oxford listening to the radio programme Desert Island Discs with my young son Alexander. It was a well-known programme (for all I know it still continues) on which famous people from all walks of life were invited to talk about the eight discs, the one book beside the bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and the one luxury item they would wish to have with them were they to be marooned on a desert island.
Even if we do not achieve perfect peace on earth, because perfect peace is not of this earth, common endeavours to gain peace will unite individuals and nations in trust and friendship and help to make our human community safer and kinder.
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