“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.”

“If you're feeling helpless, help someone. ”― Aung San Suu Kyi (from Freedom from Fear)”

“Government leaders are amazing. So often it seems they are the last to know what the people want.”

“Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children's books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds.”

“Whatever help we may want from the international community now or in the future, we want to make sure that this help is tailored to help our people to help themselves.”

“We are not out to boast that there is so much percentage of growth per year. Our real concern is how it affects the lives of people, the future of our country.”

“Human beings the world over need freedom and security that they may be able to realize their full potential.”

“Human beings want to be free and however long they may agree to stay locked up, to stay oppressed, there will come a time when they say 'That's it.' Suddenly they find themselves doing something that they never would have thought they would be doing, simply because of the human instinct that makes them turn their face towards freedom.”

“I think sometimes if you are alone, you are freer because your time is your own.”

“One person alone can't do anything as important as bringing genuine democracy to a country.”

“The democracy process provides for political and social change without violence.”