Aung San Quotes

I think the Russians might do away with the terror in twenty or thirty or years, when they are richer, and when they don't need these repressive methods so much.

Every Arab 'republic' has been a republic of fear, but only Saddam Hussein's Iraq surpassed the Assads' Syria in number of victims.

They didn't begin telling the truth in the Soviet Union until after it collapsed, did they?

We have tended to be comfortable with authoritarian regimes.

Few times in history do totalitarian or authoritarian regimes successfully repress their people for more than two generations, and zero times in history do these regimes last much longer than that, relatively speaking.

The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.

There is an understandable vindictiveness in people who come from Communist countries. They want to keep telling us that we were fools to think that we could make radical changes in our society. Though I understand their dismay, respect their suffering and don't understand the gullibility of some people who don't take in how repressive these societies are, I still think it's important to keep people of all kinds as active in civic matters as possible.

The day will come, sooner or later, when people will wonder at the necessity of taking all this trouble to expose the folly of a system, so childish and absurd, and yet so often enforced at the point of a bayonet.

Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.

You risk everything if you so much as join a legal protest demonstration in Russia. It raises the stakes.

Free speech isn't dead in Germany and Italy, merely the speakers.

If we look at history, we will see that regimes which persecute [their people] do not remain standing.

Fidel Castro's legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.

I don't think the Arab Spring had much to do with energy. I think it was just the opposite, in fact. I think the Arab Spring happened because particularly young people knew they were living in a context where they could not realize their full potential, that they are being kept down by their own governments.

Tis a Mistake to think this Fault [tyranny] is proper only to Monarchies; other Forms of Government are liable to it, as well as that. For where-ever the Power that is put in any hands for the Government of the People, and the Preservation of their Properties, is applied to other ends, and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them to the Arbitrary and Irregular Commands of those that have it: There it presently becomes Tyranny, whether those that thus use it are one or many.

I don't know whether the movement crashed as a result of the overwhelming character of the institutions we set out to change. I think repression had a lot to do with the dismantling of the movement and also the winning of certain victories had something to do with the inability of the movement to take those victories as the launching point for new goals and developing new strategies.

The worst criminals of our time are the US and UK governments. Both are devoid of all integrity, all honor, all mercy, all humanity. Many members of both governments would have made perfect functionaries in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany.

...any form of government that required the repression, imprisonment, and execution of those who disagreed with it was certainly not a government of the people.

The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system--whether political, religious or economic--that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain "indicator species" of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.

I think my government are fascists. I feel that if we don't change from a society that worships money and power over to one that worships compassion and generosity, there is no hope for human survival this century.

We're approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention, totalitarianism. Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy's enemies have refined their instruments of repression.

Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology.

I think art is the only political power, the only revolutionary power, the only evolutionary power, the only power to free humankind form all repression. I say not that art has already realized this, on the contrary, and because it has not, it has to be developed as a weapon, at first there are radical levels, then you can speak about special details.

There are still some people who think that we have Stalin to thank for all our progress, who quake before Stalin's dirty under-draws, who stand at attention and salute them.

I dare hope that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history.