Rudyard Kipling Quotes

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

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.

Urban America is like a foreign country in a sense.

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.

I would argue that Asean has been instrumental in driving both economic growth and political development, and that there can be no clearer example than its relations with Myanmar.

The South is like a foreign country to me!

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.

The time seems right for a new conception of association within the Commonwealth, not necessarily owing allegiance to the Crown, especially for those countries which have no ties of blood, culture, or religion

Only with a new ruler do you realize the value of the old.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

I hate Imperialism whether British or Japanese or Burmese.

We cannot bank our hopes on possibilities. We must put our trust in ourselves, in our capabilities and efforts and strength and preparations not only for our success but even to avoid our own defeat.

I am well aware that there is such a great craving in man for heroism and the heroic, and that hero worship forms not a small motif in his complex. I am also aware that, unless man believes in his own heroism and the heroism of others, he cannot achieve much or great things. We must, however, take proper care that we do not make a fetish of this cult of hero-worship, for then we will turn ourselves into votaries of false gods and prophets.

Unfortunately for Burma, she has had to live under the constant threat of war ever since her re-emergence as an independent state. Without assigning blame or sitting in judgment, she has come to deplore the existence of military blocs because she firmly believes that the formation and growth of such blocs only add further to the tensions already existing in the world. Furthermore, she has enough faith in human nature to believe that in a choice between mutual extinction and some form of mutual accommodation or coexistence, man will finally come to choose the latter.

...in the present circumstances of Burma, her membership in any alliance with a great-power military bloc is incompatible with her continued existence as an independent State. This may seem to be putting it strongly, but it is a fact. Our recent history is such, our experience with great powers is such, that in the minds of the people of Burma an alliance with a big power immediately means domination by that power. It means the loss of independence. You may question the validity of that belief. But perhaps you will accept my statement that it is a political fact of life today that any Government of Burma which aligned itself with a big-power bloc would at once lose the confidence and support of the people.

It is man's vision of a world fit for rational, civilized humanity which leads him to dare and to suffer to build societies free from want and fear. Concepts such as truth, justice and compassion cannot be dismissed as trite when these are often the only bulwarks which stand against ruthless power.

In an age when immense technological advances have created lethal weapons which could be, and are, used by the powerful and the unprincipled to dominate the weak and the helpless, there is a compelling need for a closer relationship between politics and ethics at both the national and international levels…. But as long as there are governments whose authority is founded on coercion rather than on the mandate of the people, and interest groups which place short-term profits above long-term peace and prosperity, concerted international action to protect and promote human rights will remain at best a partially realized struggle. There will continue to be arenas of struggle where victims of oppression have to draw on their own inner resources to defend their inalienable rights as members of the human family.

I've taken this year to concentrate fully on the promotion of 'The Lady.' This movie has been so meaningful; until we have premiered in every part of the world and encouraged as many people as possible to shine the spotlight on the Burmese people and Daw Suu, I will not have a next project.

No one goes to Pakistan to make movies. You stick out.

I get that I'm tan, and I would stand out a little bit in Japan.

I lived in Burma for a couple of summers in the '90s, working with the democratic resistance that had fled to the jungles.

Some of the parts of Burma, we met people who'd never, ever gone out of their village. And they were brutally poor; incredibly poor. And yet they enjoy their lives.

There are things that we know, and there are things that we don't know. Then there are the things that we don't even know that we don't know. Those are the things that are the hardest.

What an author doesn't know could fill a book.

I don't know what the word is in Austrian.