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Daily Inspiration Quote by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

"We want to empower our people; we want to strengthen them; we want to provide them with the kind of qualifications that will enable them to build up their own country themselves"

About this Quote

The sentence performs a neat political double move: it promises liberation while quietly redefining what liberation is supposed to look like. “We want” is doing heavy lifting here. It’s plural, paternal, and programmatic, positioning the speaker and her movement as stewards of a collective future rather than mere protestors. The repetition is also strategic. It doesn’t argue; it drums. In a country where power has often arrived through force, the cadence offers an alternative authority built from moral certainty and administrative competence.

The key word is “qualifications.” That’s a technocratic choice, almost deliberately unromantic. Instead of rallying people around vengeance or purity, it frames freedom as capacity: education, skills, civic readiness. The subtext is a rebuke to both colonial hangovers and military rule. You can’t “build up” a country if the populace is kept dependent, undertrained, or politically infantilized. Empowerment here isn’t a slogan; it’s infrastructure.

“Build up their own country themselves” is the emotional release valve. It’s an insistence on ownership, aimed at citizens who have long been treated as subjects. It also protects against the charge of elitism: the movement isn’t claiming it will save the nation, but that it will make national self-rescue possible.

Context matters: Suu Kyi’s public voice emerged in a landscape where democratic aspiration competed with authoritarian control and international scrutiny. This line is crafted to resonate domestically (dignity, self-determination) while signaling to the outside world a nation-building agenda grounded in human development, not upheaval for its own sake.

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APA Style (7th ed.)
Kyi, Daw Aung San Suu. (2026, January 17). We want to empower our people; we want to strengthen them; we want to provide them with the kind of qualifications that will enable them to build up their own country themselves. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-want-to-empower-our-people-we-want-to-52164/

Chicago Style
Kyi, Daw Aung San Suu. "We want to empower our people; we want to strengthen them; we want to provide them with the kind of qualifications that will enable them to build up their own country themselves." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-want-to-empower-our-people-we-want-to-52164/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We want to empower our people; we want to strengthen them; we want to provide them with the kind of qualifications that will enable them to build up their own country themselves." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-want-to-empower-our-people-we-want-to-52164/. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026.

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Empowerment and Nation-Building by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
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Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (born June 19, 1945) is a Activist from Myanmar.

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