Time & Perspective Quote by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

Aung San Suu Kyi punctures the technocrat's favorite balloon: growth as a self-congratulating statistic. The line is built to resist a certain kind of modern political theater, where governments perform competence by reciting GDP figures the way brands recite quarterly earnings. Her phrasing - "not out to boast" - casts that performance as not just misguided but faintly indecent, a vanity project while real lives remain unaccounted for.

The subtext is a demand for moral accounting, not just economic accounting. "Percentage of growth per year" is deliberately bloodless; it reduces a country to a spreadsheet. By contrast, "the lives of people" reintroduces the human scale that authoritarian or semi-authoritarian systems often treat as secondary: who benefits, who is displaced, whose freedoms are traded for stability, whose poverty is renamed "development". The pivot from numbers to lives also sets a trap for leaders: if you claim growth is the goal, you can hide behind averages; if you claim lives are the goal, you have to answer for distribution, dignity, and rights.

Context matters because Suu Kyi emerged as Myanmar's most globally legible voice for democracy during an era when the regime could point to modernization and investment as proof of progress. Her rhetoric insists that "future of our country" can't be secured by metrics alone; it requires institutions and a social contract people can actually live inside. It's an argument about legitimacy: prosperity that doesn't translate into everyday security and agency is not a triumph, it's a gloss.