Suu Kyi: World Is Short on Kindness

Aung San Suu Kyi finally got to deliver her acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 1991, reports Reuters. Some highlights from the Myanmar opposition leader's speech in Oslo, from AP:

• What it meant to win: "Often during my days of house arrest it felt as though I were no longer a part of the real world." Winning the Nobel "made me real once again. It had drawn me back into the wider human community. And what was more important, the Nobel Prize had drawn the attention of the world to the struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma. We were not going to be forgotten."

• Lessons of war: "The First World War represented a terrifying waste of youth and potential, a cruel squandering of the positive forces of our planet. ... And for what? Nearly a century on, we have yet to find a satisfactory answer. Are we not still guilty, if to a less violent degree, of recklessness, of improvidence with regard to our future and our humanity?"
• Human suffering: "Wherever suffering is ignored, there will be the seeds of conflict, for suffering degrades and embitters and enrages."
• 'Absolute peace': It is "an unattainable goal. But it is one towards which we must continue to journey, our eyes fixed on it as a traveler in a desert fixes his eyes on the one guiding star that will lead him to salvation."
• Kindness: "Of the sweets of adversity, and let me say that these are not numerous, I have found the sweetest, the most precious of all, is the lesson I learnt on the value of kindness. Every kindness I received, small or big, convinced me that there could never be enough of it in our world."

(More Aung San Suu Kyi stories.)