Words matter. These are the best Lee Kuan Yew Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
America’s greatest long-term influence on China comes from playing host to the thousands of students who come from China each year, some of the ablest Chinese scholars and scientists. They will be the most powerful agents for change in China.
The big nest was in Afghanistan, thats not quite cleared, then there are nests in the Philippines, there are nests in Indonesia, the Malaysians are clearing up their nests.
I always tried to be correct, not politically correct.
I’ve got one grandson gone to MIT. Another grandson had been in the American school here. Because he was dyslexic, and we then didn’t have the teachers to teach him how to overcome or cope with his dyslexia, so he was given exemption to go to the American school. He speaks like an American. He’s going to Wharton.
The exuberance of democracy leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions which are inimical to development.
Those who believe that after I have left the government as prime minister, I will go into a permanent retirement, really should have their heads examined.
Well if done a lot of hard work to try and get people to act rationally, the fact that weve had 15 deviant Muslims, plus 5 or 8 others that got away does not mean that all Muslims are deviant or extremists.
Prudence dictates that there should be a balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region.
I am not interested in ratings by Freedom House or whatever.
Latecomers to industrial development have had to catch up by finding ways of closing the gap.
Countries that are agricultural can, at a low standard of living, sustain themselves. You can be self-sufficient; the money economy is a relatively insignificant part of the total economy. Singapore never was an agricultural country.
China is not going to become a liberal democracy; if it did, it would collapse. I do not believe you can impose on other countries standards which are alien and totally disconnected with their past.
I know if I rest, I’ll slide downhill fast.
The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts.
A military presence does not need to be used to be useful.
I support the view that free trade in goods and services is a win-win situation. I’m not so convinced that free flows of capital without restriction is a win-win situation.
From 1945 to 1991, China was engaged in a series of wars that nearly broke them. This generation has been through hell: the Great Leap Forward, hunger, starvation, near collision with the Russians – the Cultural Revolution gone mad. I have no doubt that this generation wants a peaceful rise.
The acid test of any legal system is not the greatness or the grandeur of its ideal concepts, but whether, in fact, it is able to produce order and justice.
I would not score very highly on religious value.
My children were educated in what were then Chinese schools, and they learned English as a subject. But they made up when they went to English-language universities. So they didn’t lose out. They had a basic set of traditional Confucian values. Not my grandchildren.
All my life… I believed in Malaysian merger and unity of the two territories. You know that we, as a people, are connected by geography, economics, by ties of kinship.
Let the historians and the Ph.D. students work out their doctrines. I’m not interested in theories per se.
China itself is now in the process of sloughing off not only the communist system, but also those outdated parts of Confucianism that prevent the rapid acquisition of knowledge needed to adjust to new ways of life and work.
I’m not guided by what Human Rights Watch says.
You either use the Internet or you are backward.
The ultimate test of the value of a political system is whether it helps that society to establish conditions which improve the standard of living for the majority of its people.
I knew that my niece was working nearby with some bank, so my wife rang up the mother and the mother called back to say that shes just called up to say she was alright.
We are pragmatists. We don’t stick to any ideology. Does it work? Let’s try it, and if it does work, fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one. We are not enamored with any ideology.
You need a certain standard of literacy, moral and ethical values, to be able to run a one man, one vote system.
China is a vast, disparate country; there is no alternative to strong central power.
