A Woman of Courage
The Guardian has an excellent excerpt from Eight Portraits by Gordon Brown about Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi:
“For me, Suu Kyi defines the meaning of courage. Once courage was seen chiefly as a battlefield virtue. In most accounts the emphasis is on the physical - physical risk, physical vulnerability or physical triumph. It has been seen as an almost exclusively male, physical attribute: courage as daring and bravado, even recklessness; indeed, in many languages, the word for courage is derived from the word for “man”. But Suu Kyi represents the power not of the powerful but of the powerless: a woman, a prisoner of conscience up against a state with one of the worst human-rights violation records in the world; a country of only 20 million people with 1,000 political prisoners, 500,000 political refugees, children as young as four in prison, and poets and journalists tortured just for speaking out.
In the collection of her writings, Freedom from Fear, Suu Kyi describes the courage that she admires the most. It is not fearlessness but conviction, a courage of the mind; not so much a momentous act of daring as a constant condition of the mind defined by strength of belief and strength of will.”
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