Between being loved and being feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I’m meaningless.

Intelligent, rational and hard-working people can govern themselves perfectly fine. But unfortunately, only a small amount of the world population fits that description.

Intelligent, rational and hard-working people can be reasoned with through arguments. But most people only listen to those who have authority (or entertainment value).

Hence, the leader must have authority.

The leader must also, out of necessity, incite fear into his opponents; so that he is able to devote himself wholeheartedly to the ruling, and not have to worry about being attacked or slandered.

The human being is an unequal creature. This is a fact. . .

. . All great religions, all great movements, all great political ideologies start off saying ‘let’s make the human being as equal as possible’. In fact, he is NOT equal–never will be.

We only allow the U.S papers into Singapore so that we can figure out what the U.S writes about us. And what their perception of us is. We cannot allow them to assume a role in Singapore that the American media plays in America: That of the invigilator, adversary, and inquisitor of the administration.

Poeple lie or answer under the pretenses of political correctness.

What are our priorities? First, the welfare, the survival of the people. Then, democratic norms and processes which from time to time we have to suspend

Life is not just eating, drinking, television and cinema…The human mind must be creative, must be self-generating; it cannot depend on just gadgets to amuse itself.

I’m not interested in changing either my suit or my car or whatever with every change in fashion. That’s irrelevant. I don’t judge myself or my friends by their fashions. Of course, I don’t approve of people who are sloppy and unnecessarily shabby or disheveled… But I’m not impressed by a $5,000 or $10,000 Armani suit.

I was also troubled by the apparent over-confidence of a generation that has only known stability, growth, and prosperity.

The Japanese demanded total obedience and got it from nearly all. They were hated by almost everyone but everyone knew their power to do harm and so everyone adjusted. Those who were slow or reluctant to change and to accept the new masters suffered. They lived on the margins of the new society, their fortunes stagnated or declined and they lost their status. Those who were quick off the mark in assessing the new situation, and swift to take advantage of the new opportunities by making themselves useful to the new masters, made fortunes out of the terrible misfortune that had befallen all in Singapore.

I have never believed those who advocate a soft approach to crime and punishment, claiming that punishment does not reduce crime. That was not my experience in Singapore before the war, during the Japanese occupation or subsequently.

The women shrieked in surprise and disgust, much to the delight of the Arabs, who put their hands on their penises and shook them. I had seen monkeys in the Botanic Gardens in Singapore do this to visitors who refused them bananas.

I had never seen Africans before in real life, only in photographs. I was unprepared for their strange body odors, quite unlike those of the racial groups we had in Singapore. I did not sleep well that night.

I thought then that wealth depended mainly on the possession of territory and natural resources, whether fertile land with abundant rainfall for agriculture or forestry, or valuable minerals, or oil and gas. It was only after I had been in office for some years that I recognized that performance varied substantially between the different races in Singapore, and among different categories within the same race. 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.

My aversion to the communists sprang from their Leninist methods, not their Marxist ideals

I was too young, too idealistic to realize that the cost to the government would be heavy; worse, that under such an egalitarian system each individual would be more interested in what he could get out of the common pool than in striving to do better for himself, which had been the driving force for progress throughout human evolution.

To improve the world, however, all of us must first suspend faith in conventional wisdom. Let logic and evidence be the guide and our eyes will be opened to the reasons why politics works the way it does.

avoid any shooting or violent action that would cause casualties the communists could exploit to gain public sympathy. So I instructed the British officer in charge to display such an overwhelming force that troublemakers would not dare resist.

that a country needed more than a few dignified and able men at the top to get it moving. The people as a whole must have self-respect and the will to strive to make a nation of themselves. The task of the leaders must be to provide or create them a strong framework within which they can learn, work hard, be productive and be rewarded accordingly.

I was ignorant of their psychology, the mental make-up, and motivation that made them determined to prove to themselves and the world that they were men of conviction and strength, able to endure great privations and hardships for a cause, worthy to be comrades of the other warriors dedicated to the Marxist millennium.

They did not understand that when you lose, you have to be defiant, to keep up the morale of your supporters, to live and fight another day

murder, arson, acid-throwing and other crimes of violence were part of the communists’ bid for power. They had to maintain their acts of terrorism not just against the military, but also against civilians in order to cow them into a conspiracy of silence.

what was one life if another martyr could stoke up the fire of revolution?

clearly, do not want grievances to be removed but are out to maintain unrest and are out to exploit the genuine grievances of decent workers for their own evil ends.

If the honorable Member believes in orderly progress to democratic self-government, then he must be against communism; and if he is, let him say so loud and clear, with no quibble and no clever sophistry. He has deplored violence after hell was let loose and men were killed. … I ask him: What did he do to prevent violence before it happened? Is his conscience clear? Or did he lose control to the Member for Bukit Timah (Lim Chin Siong) who sits behind him and drives the party?”

In other parts of the world, when their pigs suffer from swine fever, they hush it up. They pretend they do not have it. Net result: all pigs get infected, the position becomes permanently chronic. We can do likewise. But we will become permanently a chronic society: sick. So when we get swine fever, we announce it, alert everyone, so that we can arrest the spread of the disease and bring back normalcy. This is what is required of this community: all the time, that push, that thrust to counter the natural sluggishness which this climate tends to build into our physical systems, and all that while, we must have an awareness of the realities of life.

We can build up this team spirit, this esprit de corps, where every individual gives of his best for the team, for the nation, to achieve its maximum. And the team, the nation, in turn, takes care of the individual, fairly and equitably. The art of government is the art of building up team spirit.

We have what sociologists call a highly ‘achievement-oriented’ type of society. For every boy, every girl here tonight, there are fathers and mothers egging them on to perform better than the other pupils in school. Not all societies have this. In many societies, they are quite happy just to sit down under the banyan tree and contemplate their navel. So when there is famine they just die quietly. Here, they will not die quietly. If there is no food they will do something, look for somebody, break open stores, do something, plant something, and if they have to die, they die fighting for the right to live.

When you put up an idea which I know is wrong and believe profoundly to be wrong and will do us harm, I must crush it. I don’t crush you, I crush your idea. I mean, if I’m wrong then my ideas deserve to be crushed. Maybe ‘crush’ is a harsh word, but this is a harsh world. It is a contest of whose idea is right because if it is wrong, we are going to do harm to many people.

there are some people you must protect from their own gullibility.

The fact that you have got a few activists going to the same meetings and working up steam, doesn’t mean you’ve got votes. It’s when you open the ballot boxes that you know whether the steam that you have generated has warmed anybody’s heart.

The weakness of democracy is that the assumption that all men are equal and capable of equal contribution to the common good is flawed.

I do not yet know of a man who became a leader as a result of having undergone a leadership course.

Just honor your promises, do not corrupt and debauch your party and you will find that the people believe you,

If you are impulsive and lucky, you may even pass off as an incisive mind and a decisive commander. If you are unlucky, then you are a hasty bungler and a fool. Or if you take much time for a careful weighing of the odds, but the decision nevertheless turned out wrong, people may well think you are a ditherer, perhaps, even past your prime, and getting on in years, lacking in that ability to be seized of a problem with promptness, and having weighed up the pros and cons, to act decisively. The moral is that if all turns out well, and a decision proves correct, even though taken for the wrong reasons, keep quiet about it. Your judgment may be better respected.

Good governance includes the pursuit of national interest regardless of theories or ideologies. Good government is a pragmatic government.

I am not interested in advice from Asian émigrés on what should be in Singapore. Their advice is worse than useless. They have no sense of shame, or they would stay and help their own countries progress and their fellow countrymen live less wretched lives. Instead, they flee to greener pastures and give us advice.

Why am I so strong against the media? Because they tried to put us down, they twisted everything I said, [they said] that I was a communist. And they knew I wasn’t. So I told them, in 1959 during the election campaign as they were gunning for me, I said when I win, I will show you how you have to behave yourself. 

In any given society, of the one thousand babies born, there are so many percent near-geniuses, so many percent averages, so many percent morons. I am sorry if I am constantly preoccupied with what the near-geniuses and the above-average are going to do. But I am convinced that it is they who ultimately decide the shape of things to come. It is the above-average in any society who sets the pace. We want an equal society. We want to give everybody equal opportunities. But, at the back of our minds, never deceive ourselves that two human beings are ever equal in their stamina, in their drive, in their dedication, in their innate ability. And my preoccupation is with those who can really make a contribution, who can matter, given the training and the discipline.

For cheap labor, they [the British] allowed unrestricted immigration without any plan, without any policy and without any intention of creating or preserving the self. I do not condemn the immigration as such, but I condemn the government which has no regard for the people of the country who have been assimilated and did not bother to educate or to provide education for those coming in. Today, with the renaissance of the motherland of each of the immigrant groups, chauvinist tendencies are incited. Yet at this critical juncture we have to call upon these immigrants to give this country their undivided loyalty. 

Wise parents will never let their children speak dialect at all. No child, however intelligent, has unlimited data storage capacity. The memory space is finite, be it for words, for facts, or for figures.

Whatever our race or religion, it is what we produce that entitles us to what we get, not our race or religion. Developing the economy, increasing productivity, increasing returns, these make sense only when fair play and fair shares make it worth everyone’s while to put in his share of effort for group survival and group prosperity.

Communalists and religious fanatics can, from time to time, work up racial and religious passions and ordinary people can be carried along. We cannot have our minority races worked up and pitted in hatred or fear against the majority, or have one religion so zealous for converts, or so intolerant, that they have open friction with other religions. Any communal or religious collision will be nasty and costly. Our history is besplattered with such outbursts.

After two or three generations away from China, we have become rooted in the country of our birth. Our stakes are in our home countries, not China where our ancestors came from. The Chinese Thai is a Thai and in the end he wants Thailand to prosper so that his assets in Thailand can grow and his children’s future in Thailand can be secure. So too Chinese Singaporeans, Chinese Indonesians, Chinese Malaysians and Chinese Filipinos. They may invest and visit China frequently, but few want to make China their home.

At present, no MP, Chinese, Malay or Indian, can afford to take a communal line because he has to serve a multiracial constituency. Race-based politics [would] pull apart our society as parties contest to better advance their own community interests.
Religion must not get mixed up in politics, otherwise, a clash of political views can easily turn into a clash of religious beliefs. Then there will be deep enmity between our different religious communities and our society will come to grief.

Religion cannot be a force for national unity. Indeed, secularism is essential for inter-religious harmony for our multi-religious community.

Americans are in a political malaise. Their academics and commentators know and publicly discuss their problems. But there is no political will in either the Republican or Democratic party to get American voters to face the facts of life, namely that they are living beyond their means and that to regain competitiveness, they must cut spending, especially on welfare, increase savings and investments, improve education, and improve work attitudes, before consumption can be allowed to go up again. 

Americans are not criticizing Singapore because they are concerned about democracy and human rights enjoyed by three million Singaporeans. Whether Singapore succeeds as a multiracial community in Southeast Asia or fails makes little difference to the future of America. Their real interest is what Freedom House has stated, that Singapore sets the wrong example for China, showing China that it can maintain social discipline and order with high economic growth but without becoming a full-fledged American-style democracy. This is the reason why the American media always attacks Singapore.

I have taken a deep interest in both China and India ever since I started my political life in 1950. Like all democratic socialists of the 1950s, I have tried to analyze and forecast which giant would make the grade. I had hoped it would be democratic India, not communist China. By the 1980s I had become more realistic and accepted the differences between the two. It is simplistic to believe that democracy and free markets are the formulae that must lead to progress and wealth. However, I am convinced the contrary axiom is true: that central planning and state-owned or nationalized enterprises lead to inefficiency and poor returns, whether the government is authoritarian or democratic. Moreover, even if China and India were both democratic, or authoritarian or communist, their performance would be different. I now believe that, besides the standard economic yardsticks for productivity and competitiveness, there are intangible factors like culture, religion and other ethnic characteristics and national ethos that affect the outcome.

I have got a little island with the highest standard of living in the whole of Asia outside Japan. It is like a suburban villa just placed in a tenement area with a very flimsy fence, and outside are a lot of hungry people and angry people who are being worked up by all kinds of oratory;

From time to time in the history of human civilizations, more civilized, more cultivated societies, with higher standards of living, have been overrun and subjugated by barbaric and less advanced groups. So the Roman Empire fell. And so successive Chinese and Indian civilizations were conquered by virile warrior races, who were socially and culturally of a cruder order, and less sophisticated in their social organizations. We must be on our toes all the time. We must never allow this to happen to Singapore through our growing self-indulgent and soft.

There will always be differences in national interests and perceptions but, so long as the governments and leaders of Southeast Asia are rational, these differences will not lead to armed conflict. The external threats to our security are likely to come from irrational and extremist forces, or from expansionist regimes backed by a big power.

Our basic approach is never to allow fears and tensions to grow and mount in intensity. Early preventive action can forestall an ugly build-up. So whether it is a communist conspiracy to create pressure points for mass action, or growing interracial or inter-religious frictions and tension, they have to be defused early.

The world can become a safer place only when an aggressor who invades another, especially a weaker country, is punished, not rewarded.

Communism, like so many other things, is best met when one knows it and gets immune to it. I believe the policy of complete isolation from communist thought, tactics, thinking, policy, is a dangerous thing. One day the windows will come open and like the South Sea islanders, when they first meet the tuberculosis bacilli, we will all perish. It is better to let these things come in gradual doses, containable, enough to generate a counter toxin in our wholesome society.

Seventy years in the Soviet Union of the egalitarian society, have they banished beggary, prostitution, misery, hunger? Is that the way, to suppress the individual instinct to perform, to excel, to be better than the other, to get better rewards, bigger prizes, to increase his family’s chances in life, so that they can have a better kick-off? All that was stifled with the objective of an equal egalitarian society.

China cannot revert to closed-door policies. When the veterans of the Long March leave the scene, their successors will have to prove their legitimacy, and their right to govern will depend on their ability to rapidly improve the lives of the Chinese people.

The difficulty arises from America’s expressed desire to make China more democratic. China resents and resists this as an interference in its domestic matters. Outside powers cannot re-fashion China into their own image. Let us not forget that even China’s conquerors like the Mongols in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the Manchus in the 17th to 19th centuries, could not change Chinese culture. Instead, China changed them and they were absorbed and assimilated. The language and culture of its conquerors could not overcome the Chinese language and culture.

China’s leaders have referred to me like an old friend. I am an older friend of Taiwan. If either one is damaged, Singapore will suffer a loss. If both are damaged, Singapore’s loss will be doubled. Singapore benefits when both prosper, when both cooperate and help each other prosper.

Most Chinese feel that their ancient civilization has distinctive attributes and value systems that have served them well overseas. This cultural heritage has been romanticized and treasured. Some aspects of traditional culture and customs have been criticized as being no longer relevant, that they have become obstacles to progress. Traditional Chinese custom as practiced by the early emigrants needs to be understood so that their descendants can judge and decide what is still valid today. Knowledge of the past will enable Chinese descendants overseas to observe how the Chinese in China are changing, adjusting and adapting their own traditions and custom.

Unlike other emergent countries, China wants to be China and accepted as such, not as an honorary member of the West.

Fortunately, we never attempted to subsidize rice or other staple foodstuffs. Those governments which have done so face grave problems, as more and more of their revenue goes into feeding more and more mouths at subsidized prices, generating overpopulation, under-education, low economic growth, massive unemployment, and resulting social unrest. And this is what has happened because elected governments in several new countries have balked at taking unpopular decisions.

it will be disastrous if we think we can get more and more pay for less and less work. No one owes us a living. Nothing is for free.

money seeks security without impediment to its free flow.

Like Nehru, I had been influenced by the ideas of the British Fabian Society. But I soon realized that before distributing the pie I had first to bake it. So I departed from welfarism because it sapped a people’s self-reliance and their desire to excel and succeed.

Today, one of our problems is that many young people believe that prosperity and growth are part of the nature of Singapore. It is necessary to remind them that prosperity and growth do not come naturally in a place without natural resources. They are the result of man’s effort and ingenuity.

We must avoid slipping into a situation where trade unionism is the practice of protecting the weakest and the slowest worker and, with everybody being paid the same wage, nobody will have the slightest incentive to work harder than the weakest and the slowest.

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.

There is nothing wrong about free health and education if a society can afford it. But a developing country which wants to develop, cannot afford a large increase in population. There should be more than token payments for use of these services if the ills consequent on too rapid a population growth are to be avoided. Parents must know the costs of these services. Beyond the third child, fiscal policies must be devised to check the irresponsible from putting the costs of bringing up their children on the backs of the hardworking and economically productive, who already pay more than their fair share of taxes and, because they have small families, use less than their share of these services.

When people get equal handouts, whether or not they work harder or better, everybody then works less hard. The country must go down. It is when people are encouraged to excel by being able to keep a large part of the extra reward earned by their extra efforts that the society as a whole becomes wealthier and everyone thrives and prospers. 

We have used to advantage what Britain left behind: the English language, the legal system, parliamentary government, and impartial administration. However, we have studiously avoided the practices of the welfare state. We saw how great people reduced themselves to mediocrity by leveling down. The less enterprising and less hardworking cannot be made equal simply by cutting down the achievements of the enterprising and the striving. And we have seen how difficult it is to dismantle a system of subsidized living once people get accustomed to a government providing for them.

We have achieved what is fair health care for everybody, not equal health care, but fair and practical. We are not equal, we do not eat equal food, how can we demand equal medicine?

We often get demagogues who come up and say this is exploitation of the poor, that they will give the best doctors and the best surgeons for the poor etc. They may get some votes, but most people do not believe that is practical and do not believe them.

government’s job to help the poor and that nearly half felt that the government was not doing enough. This is the easiest way to destroy self-reliance which has been a driving force for high performance. Many Singaporeans feel that the government can afford it. This is precisely the trap that the advanced countries fell into when economic growth was robust and compassion was believed to be always affordable.

Every generation has a quota of those who feel that society does not give them the status, the position, the influence, the rewards, that they deserve. They want to overturn the order of things.

Even in the capitalist West where they have tried throwing money at problems, what is the end result? You go down New York, Broadway. You will see the beggars, people on the streets. Worse than in the 1950s and in the early ’60s before the Great Society programmes. Why? Why did it get worse after compassion moved a President, motivated with a great vision of a society which was wealthy and cared for, could look after everybody – the blacks, the minorities, the dispossessed, the disadvantaged. There is more unhappiness and more hardship today and more beggars, more muggers. Why is that? Have we not learnt? Where are the beggars in Singapore? Show me. I take pride in that. Has anybody died of starvation? Anybody without a home left to die in the streets and have to be collected as dead corpses?

Because we came to the realistic conclusion that the human being is motivated by instincts that go deep down into the basic genes of life. And the first basic instinct is to protect yourself, and stronger than that, to protect your offspring so that there is the next generation. You kill that link, you have killed off mankind.

Loyalty is not something that can be measured quantitatively like height or weight. It is in the mind, in the heart. It is a question of our gut feelings.

are what you are and very often, there’s very little that polishing can do to make you different.

We must not allow our values and our philosophy of what is good government to be overwhelmed by the standards and norms of the contemporary West, regardless of their relevance to our social, economic and political conditions, simply because, for the time being, the West have the material abundance and technological superiority. Let us select the relevant factors in their societies, factors which have made them strong and have been proven by the test of time. Then we can incorporate these factors into our system without damage to ourselves.

We have developed and progressed not because we were a Western- Occidental-type society, but because we were an Asian-Oriental-type society, hardworking, thrifty and disciplined, a people with Asian values, strong family ties, and responsibility for the extended family which is a common feature of Asian cultures,

With the widespread use of English, TV, the cinema, magazines, books and tourists, Western values, culture and attitudes to life have permeated our society, particularly the young. We cannot isolate ourselves from the changing moods and thoughts of the world and the no-marriage family relationships Americans and some Europeans are experimenting with. But we can inoculate ourselves from the fashionable but passing fads and fancies. We can do this by retaining the core of our own basic cultural values, a keen sense of our own identity, our different inheritance and history and the self-confidence this awareness gives.

What is a good government? This depends on the values of people. What Asians value may not be what Americans or Europeans value. Westerners value the freedoms and liberties of the individual. As an Asian of Chinese cultural background, my values are for a government which is honest, effective and efficient in protecting its people and allowing opportunities for all to advance themselves in a stable and orderly society where they can live a good life and raise their children to do better than themselves.

I think the Americans seem to be willing to spend now and to mortgage the future, whereas no society in East Asia is mortgaging its future and letting their children pay for it. They are saving up to give their children a better start.

In all societies, there are more intelligent and less intelligent. [Some] geneticists have come to the conclusion that intelligence is principally determined by heredity. It is not unlikely that many other attributes of mind and body are also inherited. But whatever the inheritance, man, more than any other living creature, depends on nurturing and training for his capacity to mature and to develop.

There are certain areas of activity over which control by any government is both difficult and repugnant. One such area is the choice of the number of children a father and mother decide to rear. One day the pressure of circumstances may become so acute that attitudes must change.

Every person, genius or moron, has a right to reproduce himself.

With a lower birthrate, we can reach out to higher goals. We can achieve a better standard of living and a higher quality of life. With smaller families, we can invest more in each child, better health, education and training, and higher performance.

The first principle of any civilization is orderly living and the rearing of the young. I am amazed that some young Singaporeans believe that their future will be harder than their parents’. They simply do not know what a difficult and dangerous world their parents lived in, how unpromising Southeast Asia was in the 1950s to the 1970s, wracked by riots and revolution, and how much better off they are now. They are too concerned about rising property prices.

These trials and tribulations have steeled us for life.

Quite a number of countries, after gaining independence, have failed economically and collapsed socially. They lacked one essential quality: self-discipline, either in their leaders or more often both in their leaders and their people. It requires the self-discipline to budget and live within your means when you can just print more money. It requires the self-discipline to maintain the integrity and efficiency of government and administration and to punish and keep down corruption, especially in high places.

In criminal law legislation, our priority is the security and well-being of law-abiding citizens rather than the rights of the criminal to be protected from incriminating evidence.

We are not punishing because we are sadists or masochists. It gives us no pleasure, but it’s the only practical punishment that works, but unfortunately not as effectively as whipping would do.

I was never a prisoner of any theory. What guided me was reason and reality. The acid test I applied to every theory or scheme was, would it work?

We run a meritocracy. If the Lee family sets an example of nepotism, that system collapses. If I were not the Prime Minister, he [Lee Hsien Loong] could have become Prime Minister several years earlier. It is against my interest to allow any family member, who’s incapable, to be holding an important job because that would be a disaster for Singapore and my legacy. That cannot be allowed.