Singapore Lee Kuan Yew Quotes

The task of the leaders must be to provide or create for them a strong framework within which they can learn, work hard, be productive and be rewarded accordingly. And this is not easy to achieve.

To straddle the middle ground and win elections, we have to be in charge of the political agenda. This can only be done by not being beaten in the argument with our critics. They complain that I come down too hard on their arguments. But wrong ideas have to be challenged before they influence public opinion and make for problems. Those who try to be clever at the expense of the government should not complain if my replies are as sharp as their criticisms.

Whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him. Or give it up. This is not a game of cards! This is your life and mine! I've spent a whole lifetime building this and as long as I'm in charge, nobody is going to knock it down.

After trying out a number of ways to reduce inequalities and failing, I was gradually forced to conclude that the decisive factors were the people, their natural abilities, education and training. Knowledge and the possession of technology were vital for the creation of wealth.

Start with putting three of your friends to jail. You definitely know what for, and people will believe you

The Japanese high command recognised the sexual needs of the men and provided for them. As a consequence, rape was not frequent.

I did not know I was to spend the rest of my life getting Singapore not just to work but to prosper and flourish.

Men are not born equal in either physical or mental capacity. But a socialist believes that society as a whole will benefit, and there will be more happiness for more people, if all are given equal opportunities for education and advancement regardless of class or property.

You need, besides determination, all the other attributes that will push a project along. You must have application, you must be prepared to work hard, you must be prepared to get people to work with you.

I always tried to be correct, not politically correct.

I wanted someone my equal, not someone who was not really grown up and needed looking after, and I was not likely to find another girl who was my equal and who shared my interests

That which is written without much effort is seldom read with much pleasure.

The future is as full of promise as it is fraught with uncertainty.

I do not want to sound like a hawk or a dove. If I have to choose a metaphor from the aviary, I would like to think of the owl.

When you're Singapore's leader and your existence depends on performance - extraordinary performance, better than your competitors - when that performance disappears because the system on which it's been based becomes eroded, then you've lost everything... I try to tell the younger generation that and they say the old man is playing the same record, we've heard it all before. I happen to know how we got here and I know how we can unscramble it." - On one freak election result ruining Singapore

I was also troubled by the apparent over-confidence of a generation that has only known stability, growth and prosperity. I thought our people should understand how vulnerable Singapore was and is, the dangers that beset us, and how we nearly did not make it. Most of all, I hope that they will know that honest and effective government, public order and personal security, economic and social progress did not come about as the natural course of events.

You know, the cure for all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government. You get that alternative and you'll never put Singapore together again: Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again... my asset values will disappear, my apartments will be worth a fraction of what they were, my ministers' jobs will be in peril, their security will be at risk and their women will become maids in other people's countries, foreign workers. I cannot have that!" - Justifying million-dollar pay hike for Singapore ministers

You can bargain for better wages, you can bargain for higher productivity bonuses. But once the bargain has been struck, then you must enter into the spirit of the agreement, and put in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s wage. There must be no fooling around, work means discipline. Singapore’s success depends on the spirit in which workers, management and government, all three, enter into the spirit of cooperation, necessary for prosperity.

One fundamental difference between American and Oriental culture is the individual’s position in society. In American culture an individual’s interest is primary. This makes American society more aggressively competitive, with a sharper edge and higher performance. In Singapore, the interests of the society take precedence over that of the individual. Nevertheless Singapore has to be competitive in the market for jobs, goods and services. On the other hand the government helps lower income groups to meet their needs for housing, health services and education so that their children will have more of an equal chance to rise through education.

People in Hong Kong depended not on the government but on themselves and their families. They worked hard and tried their luck in business, hawking or making widgets, or buying and selling. The drive to succeed was intense; family and extended family ties were strong. Long before Milton Friedman held up Hong Kong as a model of a free enterprise economy, I had seen the advantage of having little or no social safety net. It spurred Hong Kong's people to strive to succeed.

I have no regrets. I have spent my life, so much of it, building up this country. There's nothing more that I need to do. At the end of the day, what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up?. My life."... quote from the book Hard Truth by Mr Lee Kuan Yew.

Every time we look back on this moment when we signed this agreement which severed Singapore from Malaysia, it will be a moment of anguish. For me it is a moment of anguish because all my life … you see, the whole of my adult life … I have believed in Malaysia, merger and the unity of these two territories. You know, it’s a people, connected by geography, economics and ties of kinship … Would you mind if we stop for a while?

Human beings are created unequal, and no amount of social engineering or government intervention can significantly alter one’s lot in life. At most, government policies can help equalise opportunity at the starting point, but they cannot ensure equal outcomes. Society is bound to end up with unequal outcomes

It was the first time I had left Singapore to go overseas. I was being exposed to a new world of the hates and loves, the prejudices and biases of different peoples

Lee Kuan Yew ruled Singapore from 1959 until 1990, making him, we believe, the longest serving prime minister anywhere. His party, the People’s Action Party (PAP), dominated elections and that dominance was reinforced by the allocation of public housing, upon which most people in Singapore rely. Neighborhoods that fail to deliver PAP votes come election time found the provision and maintenance of housing cut off.18 In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe went one step further. In an operation called Murambatsvina (Operation Drive Out the Rubbish), he used bulldozers to demolish the houses and markets in neighborhoods that failed to support him in the 2005 election.

I noticed that Asiatics were now referred to as Asians in the papers. I was told that sometime in 1953 the British press had started to use “Asian” because “Asiatic” had a touch of condescension or disrespect, and the change was a concession to the people of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, now independent. I did not understand how this improved their status. When young London children called me a Chinaman or a Chink, it did not trouble me. If they meant it as a term of abuse, my business was to make them think differently one day.

We accept human nature as it is, then we base our system on it. Your system must accept that human nature is like that. You get the best out of people for society by incentives and disincentives. If you remove too much of their rewards from the top tier, they will migrate.

We faced tremendous odds with an improbable chance of survival. Singapore was not a natural country but man-made, a trading post the British had developed into a nodal point in their worldwide maritime empire. We inherited the island without its hinterland, a heart without a body.

But for a very small number of people, what we stood for could easily have done a great deal of good for Malaysia and established it for many centuries to come as a stable and viable multiracial nation. ... Kinship and feelings for one another cannot be legislated out by a political decision.

And so two dogs are swimming in the waters between Singapore and Borneo—but in opposite directions. They pause halfway to exchange greetings. The dog headed toward Borneo asked the other dog why he’s swimming to Singapore. The answer: “Ah, the shopping, the housing, the air conditioning, the health care, the schools. So why are you going to Borneo?” Says the dog from Singapore: “Oh, I just want to bark.” The

At a farewell dinner, the editors gave [S.R. Nathan] a porcelain bowl. For the day before he joined us, the PM had told him: "Nathan, I am giving you The Straits Times. It has 140 years of history. It's like a bowl of china. You break it, I can piece it together, but it will never be the same." I was struck by the way the PM made his point – he knew the value and place of The Straits Times in Singapore's past, present and future.

Singapore and China did not have diplomatic relations at that time [1976]. Communism is banned in Singapore, and nobody could visit China without official approval. The Singapore government had prohibited travel there for fear that Singaporeans would be subverted and converted to the communist cause. . .The travel ban was lifted after Lee Kuan Yew's visit. He realised that nobody could experience life there and be seduced by their system. Indeed, they would better appreciate what Singapore offered.

All leaders were equal at the conference table, but those from heavyweight countries showed that they were more equal by arriving in big private jets, the British in their VC 10s and Comets, and the Canadians in Boeings. The Australians joined this select group in 1979, after Malcolm Fraser's government purchased a Boeing 707 for the Royal Australian Air Force. Those African presidents whose countries were then better off, like Kenya and Nigeria, also had special aircraft. I wondered why they did not set out to impress the world that they were poor and in dire need of assistance. Our permanent representative at the UN in New York explained that the poorer the country, the bigger the Cadillacs they hired for their leaders. So I made a virtue of arriving by ordinary commercial aircraft, and thus helped preserve Singapore's third World status for many years. However, by the mid-1990s, the World Bank refused to heed our pleas not to reclassify us as a "High Income Developing Country", giving no Brownie points for my frugal travel habits. We lost all the concessions that were given to developing countries.

The prime minister was provoked by what he considered to be unfriendly or inept coverage, or both, over many months. He concluded that the editors had lost control of the newsroom. . .What was probably the last straw for him was coverage of Israeli president Chaim Herzog's visit. When the Foreign Ministry announced the visit, fury flared across the Causeway. The Malaysian prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, recalled his high commissioner to Singapore and demanded the visit be cancelled. For Singapore to do so after the visit was announced would inflict serious damage on its sovereignty. Demonstrations erupted in many parts of Malaysia, and at the Malaysian end of the Causeway more than 100 demonstrators tried to stop a Singapore-bound train. Singapore flags were burnt. There were threats to cut off the water supply from Johor. Malaysia saw the visit as an insult. It did not recognise Israel, and had expected Singapore to be sensitive to its feelings. Singapore, however, could not refuse the Israeli request for its head of state to make a stopover visit in Singapore, the tail end of his three-week tour of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and the Philippines, the first visit to this part of the world by an Israeli leader. Singapore could hardly forget the crucial assistance Israel had provided the Singapore Armed Forces in the early days of independence, when other friendly countries like Egypt and India had declined to help. What angered Lee Kuan Yew was our coverage of the Malaysian reactions to the visit. He felt it was grossly inadequate. . .Coverage in the Malaysian English press was restrained, but in their Malay press, Singapore was condemned in inflammatory language, and accused of being Israel's Trojan horse in Southeast Asia. A threat to target Singapore Airlines was prominently reported. . .And by depriving Singaporeans of the full flavour of what the Malaysian Malay media was reporting, an opportunity was lost to educate them about the harsh reality of life in the region, with two large Muslim-majority neighbours.

Moreover, the new wealth the region now enjoys is convincing East Asians to revisit their ancient culture with fresh, more confident eyes. No longer does success automatically equate with westernization; East Asians are finding new value in their old practices, teachings, and traditions. “The 200 years of Western colonization and domination of Asia was like pouring concrete slabs over Asia’s history,” Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, and one of Asia’s most influential academics, told me over lunch in Beijing. “For Asia to modernize, Asia had to reject its past. Asia’s past was a burden so they focused on learning the best of the West. But now that they have succeeded, they are in a position to reengage with their past in a different way. You have to develop what I call ‘cultural confidence.’ What Asia is doing is finally drilling through those slabs and reconnecting back with its past. There will be a kind of cultural renaissance taking place in Asia.” He calls this trend “the most significant thing happening in Asia today.

Singapore is now in the top five. Its income per person even tops oil-rich and scarcely populated Kuwait. Having realized that the country had no natural resources, the government of founding father Lee Kuan Yew directed massive investment in human capital. Kids who were eight or ten or thirteen several decades ago are now some of the most productive citizens of today's economy. A tiny nation-state with no natural resources and a large number of people living in a relatively small physical space has managed to outearn a country with some of the largest oil deposits ever found. That is the power of investing in and nurturing young brains. Education alone may not be enough to guarantee economic success. There are other success factors that matter, like good governance, rule of law, and access to trading routes and partners. But if you were challenged to assemble a prosperous society from scratch, education would be the first building block you'd want to develop.

Marshall had taught me how not to be soft and weak when dealing with the communists. Lim Yew Hock taught me how not to be tough and flat-footed. Lim did not understand that the communist game was to make him lose the support of the masses, the Chinese-speaking people, and to destroy his credibility as a leader who was acting in their interests.

Failure to flush a public toilet is a misdemeanor carrying a stiff fine and Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew requested weekly reports on the state of the toilets at Changi airport.

All leaders were equal at the conference table, but those from heavyweight countries showed that they were more equal by arriving in big private jets, the British in their VC 10s and Comets, and the Canadians in Boeings. The Australians joined this select group in 1979, after Malcolm Fraser's government purchased a Boeing 707 for the Royal Australian Air Force. Those African presidents whose countries were then better off, like Kenya and Nigeria, also had special aircraft. I wondered why they did not set out to impress the world that they were poor and in dire need of assistance. Our permanent representative at the UN in New York explained that the poorer the country, the bigger the Cadillacs they hired for their leaders. So I made a virtue of arriving by ordinary commercial aircraft, and thus helped preserve Singapore's third World status for many years. However, by the mid-1990s, the World Bank refused to heed our pleas not to reclassify us as a "High Income Developing Country", giving no Brownie points for my frugal travel habits. We lost all the concessions that were given to developing countries.

In 1960, Singapore was a bit more than twice as prosperous as Senegal (US$1,400 vs. US$3,500 annual GDP per capita). Now they are almost forty times as prosperous as we are (US$1,500 vs. US$58,000). Imagine if we had the commitment to capitalism provided by Lee Kuan Yew instead of the socialism provided by Leopold Senghor!

countered,

I believe we should teach meditation in schools because that will save going to the doctors, taking Valium or whatever.

One of dynastic China’s great legacies, then, is high-quality authoritarian government. It is no accident that virtually all of the world’s successful authoritarian modernizers, including South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and modern China itself, are East Asian countries sharing a common Chinese cultural heritage. It is very hard to find authoritarian rulers with qualities like those of Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore or Park Chung Hee of South Korea in Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East. But

Two opinion pieces written by local author Catherine Lim in The Straits Times in 1994 were good examples of the political climate in the early years of Goh’s administration. The first article was titled “The PAP and the People: A Great Affective Divide.” Her thesis was that while the people of Singapore recognized the effective job the party did in running Singapore and providing for its prosperity, many of them did not like their leaders very much. For instance, on National Day, many Singaporeans did not fly the national flag because of the close connection between it and the PAP. Somehow flying the flag indicated you were a PAP supporter or liked the party, which in many minds was different from respecting what the leaders had done. In her second article, Lim questioned whether any significant political change had taken place with the handover of power from Lee Kuan Yew to Goh Chok Tong. She argued that the large salary increase for government officials that had been approved was an example of the continuing top-down style of government. In a way, the government’s response to these articles proved her correct. Its immediate reaction was to state that local writers had no business being involved in political issues. If they wanted to do so, they should join a political party and not give opinions from the sidelines. The argument was the same one used almost a decade earlier against the law society and against the churches. While there had been an attempt to obtain more feedback from people, there was still a deep feeling among PAP leaders that public political debate must be limited. Even in the mid-1990s, there was still a belief that too broad a discourse would threaten Singapore’s success.

I was suffering from culture shock before the phrase was coined

These people come from poor and middle-class homes. They come from different language schools. Singapore is a meritocracy. And these men have risen to the top by their own merit, hard work and high performance.

They had no confidence in themselves and even less in their own kind.

The trip down the Yangtze from Chongqing (formerly Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek's World War II capital in Sichuan) to Yichang at the exit of the gorges took one and a half days. To look up and see, high up on the perpendicular surface of sheer rock, huge Chinese characters carved thousands of years ago to commemorate events and ideas was to be awed.

The trip down the Yangtze from Chongqing (formerly Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek's World War II capital in Sichuan) to Yichang at the exit of the gorges took one and a half days. To look up and see, high up on the perpendicular surface of sheer rock, huge Chinese characters carved thousands of years ago to commemorate events and ideas was to be awed.

The notion that elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy, indeed any policy, is a gift to [founder and leader of Singapore] Lee Kuan Yew supporters or indeed the Chinese communist party, who also believe this to be true. There is of course a long tradition of doubting the efficacy of the democratic process. But I would like to think that his tradition has been expelled long ago from the heart of Europe. It now seems that the euro crisis has brought it back. I urge you all to band together in a collective bid to resist it. Democracy is not a luxury to be afforded to the creditors and denied to the debtors. Indeed, it is the lack of democratic process in the heart of our monetary union that is perpetuating the euro crisis. Then again, I might be wrong. Colleagues, if you think that I am wrong, if you agree with Wolfgang, then I invite you to say so explicitly by proposing that elections should be suspended in countries like Greece until the country's programme is completed. What is the point of spending money on elections and asking our people to get all fired up to elect governments that will have no capacity to change anything?