Top 100 Quotes

I would not score very highly on religious value.

The exuberance of democracy leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions which are inimical to development.

The First World became a popular phrase in about the 1970s and '80s. The World Bank then began categorizing countries in different categories, advanced to the least developed.

The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts.

It's irrelevant to me what young Singaporeans think of me. I've lived long enough to know that you may be idealised in life and reviled after you're dead.

How do I comfort myself? Well, I say, 'Life is just like that.'

I know if I rest, I'll slide downhill fast.

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.

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.

If you deprive yourself of outsourcing and your competitors do not, you're putting yourself out of business.

I can feel the gradual decline of energy and vitality. And I mean generally, every year, when you know you are not on the same level as last year. But that's life.

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.

I always tried to be correct, not politically correct.

The enduring lesson is war is a disaster. Whoever wins, tremendous loss of life, property - a set back for civilisation.

I am not interested in ratings by Freedom House or whatever.

I had some very powerful minds working with me.

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 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.

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.

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.

The original communitarianism of Chinese Confucian society has degenerated into nepotism, a system of family linkages, and corruption, on the mainland. And remnants of the evils of the original system are still found in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and even Singapore.

President Nixon was a pragmatic strategist. He would engage, not contain, China, but he would also quietly set pieces into place for a fallback position should China not play according to the rules as a good global citizen.

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.

I was a product of the times, the war, the occupation, the reoccupation, my 4 years in Britain, admiring but at the same time questioning whether they are able to do a better job than we can.

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.

I'm reaching 87, trying to keep fit, presenting a vigorous figure, and it's an effort, and is it worth the effort? I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It's become my habit. I just carry on.

A military presence does not need to be used to be useful.

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.

Let the historians and the Ph.D. students work out their doctrines. I'm not interested in theories per se.

I have always thought that humanity was animal-like. The Confucian theory was man could be improved, but I'm not sure he can be. He can be trained; he can be disciplined.

Freedom of the news media must be subordinated to the overriding needs of Singapore, and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government.

If Singapore is a nanny state, then I am proud to have fostered one.

I'm not guided by what Human Rights Watch says.

Of-course we did, but we didn't reply because we knew once this leaks the others will scatter, so in the few days we moved quickly before the press got hold of it. The press did get hold of it a few days later, we nabbed, we were able to get 15, the others got away.

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.

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.

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.

At the end of the day, is Singapore society better or worse off? That's the test.

The values that East Asian culture upholds, such as the primacy of group interests over individual interests, support the total group effort necessary to develop rapidly.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and China are more likely to view each other as competitors if not adversaries. But the die has not been cast. The best possible outcome is a new understanding that when they cannot cooperate, they will coexist and allow all countries in the Pacific to grow and thrive.

China is a vast, disparate country; there is no alternative to strong central power.

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.

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.

In the East, the main object is to have a well-ordered society so that everybody can have maximum enjoyment of his freedoms. This freedom can only exist in an ordered state and not in a natural state of contention and anarchy.

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.

As an East Asian looking at America, I find attractive and unattractive features. I like, for example, the free, easy and open relations between people regardless of social status, ethnicity or religion.

If you are going to lower me into the grave, and I feel something is wrong, I will get up.

In the West, especially after World War II, the government came to be seen as so successful that it could fulfill all the obligations that in less modern societies are fulfilled by the family.

You need a certain standard of literacy, moral and ethical values, to be able to run a one man, one vote system.

You either use the Internet or you are backward.

Peace and security both in Europe and in the Pacific still depend on a balance of power.

Prudence dictates that there should be a balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region.

The difficult part was getting the people to change their habits so that they behaved more like first world citizens, not like third world citizens spitting and littering all over the place.

Peace and security in the Asia-Pacific will turn on whether China emerges as a xenophobic, chauvinistic force, bitter and hostile to the West because it tried to slow down or abort its development, or whether it is educated and involved in the ways of the world - more cosmopolitan, more internationalized and outward looking.

Latecomers to industrial development have had to catch up by finding ways of closing the gap.

Evil requires the sanction of the victim.

Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.

I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.

The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.

Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.

From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.

The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.

Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.

When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.

To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.

To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.

To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.