Top 90 Lee Kuan Yew Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If you do not know history, you think short term. If you know history, you think medium and long term.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

52. “A society to be successful must maintain a balance between nurturing excellence and encouraging the average to improve.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

53. “Anybody who decides to take me on needs to put on knuckle-dusters. If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you, try. There is no way you can govern a Chinese society.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

54. “If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

55. “If you can’t think because you can’t chew, try a banana.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

56. “I’m not intellectually convinced that one-man, one-vote is the best. We practise it because that’s what the British bequeathed us.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

57. “Without the elected president and if there is a freak result, within two or three years, the army would have to come in and stop it.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

58. “For reasons of sentiment, I would like part of my ashes to be mixed up with Mama’s, and both her ashes and mine put side by side in the columbarium. We were joined in life and I would like our ashes to be joined after this life.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

59. “The same law applies to me. Nobody has sued me for libel because I do not defame my enemies.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

60. “They say, oh, let’s have multiparty politics. Let’s have different parties change and be in charge of the Government. Is it that simple? You vote in a Division Three government, not a Division One government, and the whole economy will just subside within three, four years. Finished.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

61. “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.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

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

— Lee Kuan Yew

63. “If I were in authority in Singapore indefinitely without having to ask those who are governed whether they like what is being done, then I would not have the slightest doubt that I could govern much more effectively in their interests.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

64. “That was the year the British decided to get out and sell everything. So I immediately held an election. I knew the people will be dead scared. And I won my bet big-time. The gullible fools!”

— Lee Kuan Yew

65. “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.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

66. “The art of government is the art of building up team spirit.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

67. “I feel sanguine enough to say that there has never been a better set of conditions for open democratic politics because there is no need for unified front politics.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

68. “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.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

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

— Lee Kuan Yew

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

— Lee Kuan Yew

71. “I make no apologies that the PAP is the Government and the Government is the PAP.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

72. “Singaporeans, if I can chose an analogy, we are the hard disk of a computer, the foreign talent are the megabytes you add to your storage capacity. So your computer never hangs because you got enormous storage capacity.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

73. “Any time, every time, you can damn the Prime Minister and so long as it is not a lie and a criminal lie, nothing happens to you. You can say a lot of things. You can write books about him, damning him. So long as it is not a libel, go ahead.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

74. “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.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

75. “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.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

76. “Most libels, and I have taken about 30 actions, take place at election time. It has not stuck because I am prepared to go before a court, stand in the witness box and face the most aggressive of lawyers who can cross-examine me on my personal history.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

77. “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.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

78. “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.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

79. “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.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

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

— Lee Kuan Yew

81. “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.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

82. “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.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

83. “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.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

84. “Some people believe that, having debauched themselves in one political party or front, they can, like the phoenix, arise from the ashes of the old in the feathers of a new party, front or movement as fresh as if nothing had happened. In fact, there is no such magic formula for longevity in political life other than the simple and the obvious: just honour your promises; do not corrupt and debauch your party. 1956.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

85. “Mine is a very matter-of-fact approach to the problem. If you can select a population and they’re educated and they’re properly brought up, then you don’t have to use too much of the stick because they would already have been trained. It’s like with dogs. You train it in a proper way from small. It will know that it’s got to leave, go outside to pee and to defecate. No, we are not that kind of society. We had to train adult dogs who even today deliberately urinate in the lifts.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

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

— Lee Kuan Yew

87. “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

88. “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.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

89. “If Aljunied decides to go that way, well Aljunied has five years to live and repent.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

90. “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.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

91. “Supposing Catherine Lim was writing about me and not the prime minister... She would not dare, right? Because my posture, my response has been such that nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul de sac... Anybody who decides to take me on needs to put on knuckle dusters. If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you, try. There is no other way you can govern a Chinese society.”

— Lee Kuan Yew

92. “But it is possible to create a society in which everybody is given not equal rewards, but equal opportunities, and where rewards vary not in accordance with the ownership of property, but with the worth of a person’s contribution to that society. In other words, society should make it worth people’s while to give their best to the country. This is the way to progress.”

— Lee Kuan Yew