Time & Perspective Quote by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

Aung San Suu Kyi’s line reads like restraint, but it’s really leverage disguised as patience. “We will not change” lands with the firmness of a barricade, then immediately offers a narrow gate: “until such time as dialogue has begun.” That conditional clause is the entire strategy. It refuses to grant legitimacy to backroom bargaining or cosmetic reforms, insisting that the first concession must be procedural and public: talk, openly, as equals.

The phrasing is careful in a way that reflects the terrain Suu Kyi operated in for decades under Myanmar’s military rule. “Matters of policy” signals she’s not speaking about personal grievances or symbolic gestures; she’s drawing a line around governance itself. At the same time, the sentence avoids inflammatory language. There’s no denunciation, no ultimatum, no threat. That’s not softness; it’s insulation. It makes the demand harder to paint as extremist while putting the onus on the other side: if nothing changes, it’s because dialogue hasn’t started.

The subtext is a rebuke of performative “national reconciliation” that excludes the opposition. Dialogue becomes the moral baseline, not the end goal. It also hints at the asymmetry of power: when one party controls the guns, the dissident’s strongest tool is legitimacy. Suu Kyi stakes that legitimacy on process. She’s saying: policy will move only after the regime admits, in the most basic democratic sense, that her side exists and must be heard.