“We will surely get to our destination if we join hands.”

Please use your freedom to promote ours.

More people, especially young people, are realising that if they want change, they’ve got to go about it themselves – they can’t depend on a particular person, ie me, to do all the work. They are less easy to fool than they used to be, they now know what’s going on all over the world.

It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear.

The courage that dares without recognition, without the protection of media attention, is a courage that humbles and inspires and reaffirms our faith in humanity.

The important thing is fear should not control your actions. It should not dictate what you do.

I think that freedom is sometimes a state of mind. Sometimes, mind you, but not always.

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.

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.

Fear is a habit; I am not afraid.

My attitude to peace is rather based on the Burmese definition of peace – it really means removing all the negative factors that destroy peace in this world.

Intimidation and propaganda work in a duet of oppression, while the people, lapped in fear and distrust, learn to dissemble and to keep silent.

There is a time to be quiet and a time to talk.

Challenges mean opportunities as well.

The people of my country want the two freedoms that spell security: freedom from want and freedom from fear.

So peace does not mean just putting an end to violence or to war, but to all other factors that threaten peace, such as discrimination, such as inequality, poverty.

If you can make people understand why freedom is so important through the arts, that would be a big help.

Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.

What are a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands?

When I was 14, I wanted to smoke because my mother smoked like mad. I wanted to smoke to look grown-up. But my mother said: ‘You shouldn’t smoke. Your hands are not that beautiful and that shows when you smoke.

First one, then the other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the mellowness of full achievement.

I can definitely hold my hands up and say wrestling wasn’t something that I grew up watching.

A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.

In the closing seconds of every game, I want the ball in my hands for the last shot – not in anybody else’s, not in anybody else’s in the world.

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.