Politics & Power Quote by Aung San Suu Kyi

Aung San Suu Kyi’s line is doing something more pointed than self-justification: it’s an attempt to rescue “politician” from the moral trash heap, especially in places where politics is shorthand for corruption, compromise, and betrayal. The insistence that it’s “not a dirty work” reads like a rebuttal delivered to an audience already rolling its eyes. She knows the default suspicion. So she doesn’t plead innocence; she normalizes the job.

The phrasing matters. “I look upon myself as a politician” is a deliberate crossing of a boundary that activists are often encouraged to keep intact. Activists get to claim purity; politicians are expected to get their hands dirty. Suu Kyi refuses that comforting division. The subtext is: if you want structural change, you can’t only bear witness; you have to govern, negotiate, legislate, and accept accountability. In that sense, it’s also a claim of legitimacy: she’s not merely protesting power, she’s staking a right to wield it.

Then comes the careful concession: “something wrong with some politicians.” It’s a classic rhetorical pressure valve. She grants the obvious without surrendering the category. Corruption isn’t innate to politics, she implies; it’s a contingent failure of individuals and systems. In the context of a pro-democracy movement facing authoritarian rule, that distinction is strategic. It invites citizens to stop treating politics as contamination and start treating it as a civic instrument - one that can be repaired, populated, and, crucially, fought for.