Burma's Quotes

#1. I urge North Korea's leaders to reflect on Burma's experience. While the work of reform is ongoing, Burma has already broken out of isolation and opened the door to a far better future for its people.

Thomas E. Donilon

#2. I turned into a monk when my mother went to learn Buddhism in Burma. While she learnt at the monastery, I used to roam around with a begging bowl and ask for food.

Kabir Bedi

#3. Seeds of destruction take root in the human heart, and even among those who long for peace, they call to our darker instincts and urge us to violence.:

Victoria Armour-Hileman

#4. This is Burma and it is unlike any land you know about.

Rudyard Kipling

#5. My mother used to say that rain here pours like a blessing, like a thick veil that parts to reveal the bride's face. But nearly every day, when this rain parted, it revealed a long line of soldiers, like you, like death, marching toward us, and we would scatter with a practiced silence and hide.

Mia Kirshner

#6. An earthquake is such fun when it is over.

George Orwell

#7. There is still a severe and scary amount of extreme poverty in rural parts of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma and sub-Saharan Africa.

Hans Rosling

#8. Like, Mission Of Burma to me always sounded almost like they were part of the British Arty New Wave. I kind of like that. I like not being able to tell the difference.

Graham Coxon

#9. That cyclone in Burma? That was just me doing the dance to that annoying ass song ...

Zach Braff

#10. I've been repeating ad nauseam that we in Burma, we are weak with regard to the culture of negotiated compromises, that we have to develop the ability to achieve such compromises.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#11. I think when the people in Burma stop thinking about whether or not they're free, it'll mean that they're free.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#12. I've always said that the more coordinated the efforts of the international community are, the better it will be for democracy in Burma.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#13. I'm not the only one working for democracy in Burma - there are so many people who have worked for it because they believe that this is the only way we can maintain the dignity of our people.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#14. Like the crocodile, he strikes always at the weakest spot.

George Orwell

#15. There are no Rohingya among the races [in Burma]. We only have Bengalis who were brought for farming [during British rule].

Thein Sein

#16. 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.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#17. My top priority is for people to understand that they have the power to change things themselves.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#18. We spent time on Burma and the need for the military regime there to understand that they shouldn't fear the voices of people. And yet they do.

George W. Bush

#19. It could achieve a lot if everyone in Burma could stop saying something is good if it is not good, or say something is just if it is not just.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#20. This week I've travelled more than 15,000 miles from America to China to Burma to Australia. I have no idea what time it is right now.

Barack Obama

#21. Amitav Ghosh's multigenerational saga The Glass Palace, set in colonial Burma, India, and Malaya, tells the story of Rajkumar, once a poor Indian boy, who becomes a wealthy teak trader in Burma, and lovely Dolly, former child-maid to the queen and second princess of Burma.

Nancy Pearl

#22. The judiciary in Burma is not independent. It's widely known, everybody knows that.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#23. My mother was born in Burma, but my grandfather on her side was Indian-Spanish. So I have this quite exotic mix, which is reflected in my earliest memories, in our Wiltshire country kitchen, of gran, and aunts, cooking spicy stewy, casseroley curries, a version of Indian food with a Burmese twist.

Jamie Cullum

#24. Argentina and Burma. I have been to most of the countries in the world, but not those two. I want to shoot doves in Argentina. Burma, of course, because no one has really been there.

Jeremy Clarkson

#25. I love Southeast Asia. As a child, I lived in that part of the world. My first time in Burma was in 1958 with my parents.

Muhtar Kent

#26. Dr. Gordon S. Seagrave, the famous "Burma Surgeon.

Ralph Ellison

#27. We stepped carefully, so softly, over thorny plants. The dust had turned to mud, splattering our shoes, socks, and legs. By the time we reached the boat, our clothes were clinging to our flesh and stained with the bloody remains of mosquitoes.

Mia Kirshner

#28. 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.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#29. It is the love of ordinary people, in Burma, in Japan or anywhere else in the world, for justice and peace and freedom that is our surest defense against the forces of unreason and extremism ...

Aung San Suu Kyi

#30. Early railway journeys took him to Ceylon, Thailand, and Burma; he would later describe his wanderlust as the "peripatetics of a Jewish prince".

VO Blum

#31. My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.

Richard Flanagan

#32. Ah-rah-han, the first Buddhist apostle of Burma, under the patronage of King Anan-ra-tha-men-zan, disseminated the doctrines of atheism and taught his disciples to pant after annihilation as the supreme good.

Adoniram Judson

#33. The problem in Burma is the problem in Egypt, the problem you refer to in Yemen, and the problem in a lot of these countries in the world: that you can get stuck in the process of transition, in what's been called a competitive authoritarian ... a pseudo democratic regime.

Larry Diamond

#34. You most likely know it as Myanmar, but it will always be Burma to me.

John O'Hurley

#35. Give me fifty DC-3's and the Japanese can have the Burma Road.

Chiang Kai-shek

#36. Central Intelligence cutting Meo opium fields! China Lobby copping poppies in Burma! How long this Addict government support our oil-burner matter-habit

Allen Ginsberg

#37. Those of us who decided to work for democracy in Burma made our choice in the conviction that the danger of standing up for basic human rights in a repressive society was preferable to the safety of a quiescent life in servitude

Aung San

#38. It's good to know that the people of different countries are really concerned and involved in the movement to help Burma. I think in some ways it's better to have the people of the world on your side than the governments of the world, even if governments can be more effective in certain directions.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#39. Unless there is free and fair competition, there can't be healthy economic development. And what we have in Burma now is not an open-market economy that allows free and fair competition, but a form of colonialism makes a few people very, very wealthy. It's what you would crony capitalism.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#40. Burma evoked the lost Kenyan soldiers who served in the war. You never hear about them. There were a significant number of casualties, men who never came back home. But they're never commemorated.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

#41. He showed me how ... See, he says he's going up through Laos, then into Burma, and then some other country, I forget, and then India and Iran and Turkey, and then Greece, and the rest is easy. That's what he said. The rest is easy, he said.

Tim O'Brien

#42. My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl Harbor, and by the beginning of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Burma and Singapore had started.

Tom Stoppard

#43. My message to the international community is that our silence and complicity especially on the situation in Gaza shames us all. It is almost like the behaviour of the military junta in Burma

Desmond Tutu

#44. What does Burma have to give the United States? We can give you the opportunity to engage with people who are ready and willing to change a society.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#45. Eight hundred people, possibly, are murdered every year in Burma, they matter nothing; but the murder of a white man is a monstrosity, a sacrilege.

George Orwell

#46. Be careful about Burma. Most people cannot remember whether it was Siam and has become Thailand, or whether it is now part of Malaysia and should be called Sri Lanka.

Alexander Cockburn

#47. Bursts of gold on lavender melting into saffron. It's the time of day when the sky looks like it has been spray-painted by a graffiti artist.

Mia Kirshner

#48. With the right kind of institutions, starting with the rule of law, Burma could progress very quickly.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#49. I don't want Burma to be a basket case forever.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#50. As long as there is no law in Burma, any individual here can be arrested at any time.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#51. Well, we have to do something. There are all sorts of rumours about soldiers coming up."
"These people are full of rumours. They love rumours." Paterson stood watching the bridge. "Their whole life is a rumour.

H.E. Bates

#52. If you can't change it don't worry about it.

David Barrett

#53. The Democrats are going the way of Burma Shave and Crisco - products everyone loved and had in their homes. But they got old. They didn't have anything new to say about the product, and after awhile, they died.

Jerry Della Femina

#54. I will not leave Burma until the cross is planted here forever.

Adoniram Judson

#55. Millard! Who's the prime minister?"
"Winston Churchill," he said. "Have you gone daft?"
"What's the capital of Burma?"
"Lord, I've no idea. Rangoon?"
"Good! When's your birthday?"
"Will you quit shouting and let me bleed in peace!

Ransom Riggs

#56. Seriously, just have the gonads to quote yourself! ^^

T.F. Rhoden

#57. In the 'Nike Economy,' there are no standards, no borders and no rules. Clearly, the global economy isn't working for workers in China and Indonesia and Burma any more than it is for workers here in the United States.

John Sweeney

#58. But if the world measures a refugee according to the worst story, we will always excuse human suffering, saying it is not yet as bad as someone else's.

Victoria Armour-Hileman

#59. As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere-the truer shout is not "Never again" but "Again and again.

Paul Theroux

#60. It is essential to institute a legal framework that would ensure justice and improve the quality of life in Burma immediately, because the greatest suffering among the people at the moment is caused by lack of justice and lack of the rule of law.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#61. I claim we got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it.

Joseph Stilwell