The best way to help Burma is to empower the people of Burma, to help us have enough self-confidence to obtain what we want for ourselves.

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 nothing to be gained by being unnecessarily nasty. Violence begets violence.

I do not believe that I'm sacrificing, in fact I feel very uneasy when others used the word sacrifice to describe my life. It sounds like I'm demanding returns for my investments. I chose to walk on this journey, because I solely believed in it and wholeheartedly decided to do so, and I'm willing and able to pay for the consequences.

We want to empower our people; we want to strengthen them; we want to provide them with the kind of qualifications that will enable them to build up their own country themselves.

Fear is a habit; I am not afraid.

In Burma, we need to find out what we have to do in order to keep the democratization process on track. Economic reforms have to be taken one by one. You see it's not just speed that's important, it's sequencing as well. You've got to get the speed right; you have to get the sequencing right.