All of the following quotes (except the very last) are by Lee Kuan Yew. Almost all are from establishment sources, such as The Straits Times, the National Archives of Singapore, authorised interviews and biographies, and books published by the Singapore Press Holdings. Only the final four quotes are from non-establishment sources (The New Straits Times, Michael D. Barr, and hearsay).
Lee Kuan Yew Quotes Enjoy the top 116 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Lee Kuan Yew. “ Life is better than death. But death comes eventually to everyone. Lee Kuan Yew, the founder and first prime minister of Singapore, on freedom of speech, building a nation, political rivals and chewing gum. Apr 3, 2015 - Explore Serving Joy with Jeremiah Say's board 'Lee Kuan Yew Quotes' on Pinterest. See more ideas about Important life lessons, Churchill quotes, Life lessons.
If there are any errors (broken links, typos) or any quotes you believe have been taken out of context, please email me: l**k***y**racist at gmail.
First posted Jan 2018. Last updated 2020-07-07.
There are deep and abiding differences between groups. And whatever we do, we must remember that in Singapore, the Malays feel they are being asked to compete unfairly, that they are not ready for the competition against the Chinese and the Indians and the Eurasians. They will not admit or they cannot admit to themselves that, in fact, as a result of history, they are a different gene pool and they do not have these qualities that can enable them to enter the same race.
In Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas (TMHI,Google Books).
[The World Bank report] makes the hopeful assumption that all men are equal, that people all over the world are the same. They are not. Groups of people develop different characteristics when they have evolved for thousands of years separately. Genetics and history interact …
1994 interview with Foreign Affairs (quoted in TMHI, Google Books).
Referring to opposition MP Chiam See Tong’s views about a shifting ratio of races and a possible composition of one-third each for Chinese, Malays and Indians, Mr Lee said:
“Let me tell you what I would think if I were an Indian. Why not 76 per cent Indians, 15 per cent Malays and 7 per cent Chinese? That is better still.
“But you know this is the real world. Let us just maintain status quo. And we have to maintain it or there will be a shift in the economy, both the economic performance and the political backdrop which makes that economic performance possible.”
Mr Lee said statistics showed there will be significant differences in the economy of Singapore if the ratio were transposed.
“You look at the educational levels of the performers. It has got to do with culture, nature and so many other factors. But year after year, this is the end result. Let’s leave well alone. The formula has worked. Keep it. And of course the founder members are all of us, whether we are Indians, Chinese or Malays.”
1989 National Day Rally speech, quoted in The Straits Times, August 21st, 1989, p. 17 (PNG).
Malays were assured by Mr Lee Kuan Yew last night that they did not need to worry about the arrival of Hongkongers who migrate there … As the Hongkongers would be coming in as employment pass holders each earning at least $1,500 a month, he said that they would not compete directly for jobs with the Malays.
Id., “Malays need not worry about Hongkongers”.
I started off believing all men were equal … I now know that’s the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils.
You take the American Red Indian. He is genetically a Mongolian or Mongoloid, the same as the Chinese and the Koreans. But they crossed over, according to the anthropologists and the geologists, when the Bering Straits was a bridge between America and Asia. But for a few thousand years, in Asia, they had invading armies to-ing and fro-ing, huge infusions of different kinds of genes into the population from Genghis Khan, from the Mongols, from the Manchus, God knows how many invasions. And in the other, isolation, with only the buffaloes, until the white men came and they were weak and defenceless against white men’s diseases and were eliminated. So whilst they were identical in stock, origin, they ended up different.
I didn’t start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I’ve come to.
This is something which I have read and I tested against my observations. We read many things. The fact that it’s in print and repeated by three, four authors does not make it true. They may all be wrong. But through my own experience, meeting people, talking to them, watching them, I concluded: yes, there is this difference. Then it becomes part of the accepted facts of life for me.
In TMHI (Google Books).
On the contrast between the Chinese and the Malays:
One is a product of a civilisation which has gone through all its ups downs, of floods and famine and pestilence, breeding a people with very intense culture, with a belief in high performance, in sustained effort, in thrift and by nature with warm sunshine and bananas and coconuts, and therefore not with the same need to strive so hard. Now, these two societies really move at two different speeds. It’s like the difference between a high-revolution engine and a low-revolution engine. I’m not saying that one is better or less good than the other. But I’m just stating a fact that one was the product of another environment, another history, another civilisation, and the other is a product of another different climate, different history.
Interview with Alan Ashbolt, Canberra, March 17th, 1965 (PDF).
Well, we make them say the national pledge and sing the national anthem but suppose we have a famine, will your Malay neighbour give you the last few grains of rice or will she share it with her family or fellow Muslim or vice versa?
Interview with National Geographic, July 6th, 2009 (transcript at National Archives).
I have said this on many a previous occasion: that had the mix in Singapore been different, had it been 75% Indians, 15% Malays and the rest Chinese, it would not have worked. Because they believe in the politics of contention, of opposition. But because the culture was such that the populace sought a practical way out of their difficulties, therefore it has worked.
Debate on President’s Address, March 1st, 1985 (page).
throughout East Asia, because they were influenced by China and probably not just by culture alone, there must have been a lot of similar genes, similar stock, probably the physical makeup was not very different, so they were very intense types, hard-driving, hard- striving people. Whereas if you go to India, you’ll find sadhus, holy men, people who abjure the world, who go around giving land away or begging from the rich to give to the poor. It’s a totally different culture. There’s the sort of Gandhi saintliness. It’s not the model in China. In China, the model is either Three Kingdoms or Shui Hu Zhuan, Water Margin, the kind of hero who forms a robber band and kills off wealthy people. You don’t go begging from the wealthy to give to the poor. You just kill the wealthy and take from them.
So it is a completely different philosophy to guide a man in life. The Indians have a more tolerant and forgiving approach to life. More next-worldly. If you do good, then in the next world you’ll get rewarded.
Quotes Lee Kuan Yew Die
In TMHI (Google Books).
At the very beginning, the Malays were not hardworking, nor were a lot of the Indians. We encouraged them to keep up. I’m not sure whether they will not feel a little resentful, but I mean this is part of history. I know that it took a long time before the Malays accepted that they had to work hard because it was not in their culture.
In TMHI (Google Books).
We could not have held the society together if we had not made adjustments to the system that gives the Malays, although they are not as hardworking and capable as the other races, a fair share of the cake. Their lives are improving, they have got their own homes, more are receiving tertiary education and becoming professionals in various fields. They’re improving because they see their neighbors pushing their children in education and so that helps.
Interview with Tom Plate, in Giants of Asia: Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew, 2010 (Google Books).
Added on 2020-07-07:
had there been a Malay group that emerged, and they would have emerged easily if we had proportional representation, and not the first-past-the-post in each constituency, you consider the polarisation that would take place as they expound Malay rights and Malay language, and the policies which they think should prevail seeing what goes on around us, and the antagonisms which that would generate in reaction.
We would have them in a head-on collision. I have never deceived myself.
The Indians never vote, never agree to vote any single party. They like contention. It is in their nature (laughter). And it is established by our polls.
The day the Chinese lose their Confucianess, their Confucian tendencies to coalesce around middle ground, that day we will become just another society.
Talk at NUS on Dec 12th, 1986, as quoted by The Straits Times, Dec 16th, 1986, p. 24 (PNG).
So Sammy Davies [sic] is a Jew. That is where he has got his talent from. First, you see his nose. Then you hear his voice. He got it from his African line, a tremendous big voice. He had the best of both worlds. I think that is critical.
Speech to Parliament, February 23rd, 1977 (PDF).
[Editor’s remark: Sammy Davis Jr. was not actually Jewish. He was born to an African-American father and an Afro-Cuban mother. He converted to Judaism in midlife.]
I understand the Englishman. He knows deep in his heart that he is superior to the Welshman and the Scotsman. That is why the Welshman and the Scotsman now, particularly the Scotsman with the North Sea oil, says, “O.K., I want to be independent on my own.” … Deep here, I am a Chinaman.
Ibid.
Let us not deceive ourselves: our talent profile is nowhere near that of, say, the Jews or the Japanese in America. The exceptional number of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews is no accident. It is also no accident that a high percentage, sometimes 50%, of faculty members in the top American universities on both the east and west coasts are Jews. And the number of high calibre Japanese academics, professionals, and business executives is out of all proportion to the percentage of Japanese in the total American population.
“The Search for Talent”, Speech, August 12th, 1982 (PDF).
The Bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. Asians score more … the Bell curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. Ths are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow.
… Supposing we had hidden the truth and taken the American approach and said, all men are equal. Then they (The less able or well-off) will demand equal results. And when the results are not equal, they will demand more equal treatment.
In TMHI (Google Books).
On the viability of multiracial societies:
I have said openly that if we were 100 per cent Chinese, we would do better. But we are not and never will be, so we live with what we have.
In TMHI (Google Books).
But I would like to be able to assure you that, after my journey through – this is my first visit to Australia – this was my passing thought: Unlike America, where they had slave labour such as Negro labour, you built this on your own, on your labour. And I think you are the healthier for it, the better for it, and unlike the people who come here and say robbed this from somebody else.
Meeting at Trade Union Hall, Adelaide, March 30th, 1965 (PDF).
Quotes Lee Kuan Yew Do For Singapore
The Chinaman who came out to Southeast Asia was a very hard working, thrifty person. I mean he faced a tremendous stride because he faced floods, pestilence, famine and the drive. The capacity for hard work and sustained effort is something to be seen, to be believed. And we are getting soft. You know, I mean, all sunshine and bananas growing on trees and coconuts falling down by themselves – this affects the people. I don’t know. To a certain extent, you can try and counter it. You know, make sure that you don’t being, sort of, get reduced to keep it going and create a stagnant sort of society. You know, the Americans possess their tropical areas too and chaps sitting down by the lagoons and so on.
Id.
If you don’t include your women graduates in your breeding pool and leave them on the shelf, you would end up a more stupid society. The men don’t believe me. Every year, I produce them the results. You marry that kind of a wife, you get this kind of a result. They close their minds. I think we are not going to become as good a society as we were with each generation … This is the basic stock of success. If you don’t have this, you can have the best human resources programme, but your human resource is poor.
In the older generations, economics and culture settled it. The pattern of procreation was settled by economics and culture. The richer you are, the more successful you are, the more wives you have, the more children you have. That’s the way it was settled. I am the son of a successful chap. I myself am successful, so I marry young and I marry more wives and I have more children. You read Hong Lou Meng, A Dream of the Red Chamber, or you read Jin Ping Mei, and you’ll find Chinese society in the 16th, 17th century described. So the successful merchant or the mandarin, he gets the pick of all the rich men’s daughters and the prettiest village girls and has probably five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten different wives and concubines and many children. And the poor labourer who’s dumb and slow, he’s neutered. It’s like the lion or the stag that’s outside the flock. He has no harems, so he does not pass his genes down. So, in that way, a smarter population emerges.
Now, we are into a stage of disgenics — not eugenics — where the smarter you are, the more successful you are, the more you calculate. And you say, look, yes, for the good of socially, I should have five children, but what’s the benefit to me? And the wife says, What? Five children? We can’t go on holidays. So one is enough, or at the most two. The people at the lower end — in our three-room flats, two-rooms — some of them have 10, 12 to 14 children.
So what happens? There will be less bright people to support more dumb people in the next generation. That’s a problem. And we are unable to take firmer measures because the prevailing sentiment is against it. But these are the realities. You cannot disapprove of it and say it’s a pity that it should work that way. That’s the way procreation has been structured by nature. And we are going about it in an obtuse and idiotic way.
1983 National Day Rally Speech (quoted in TMHI, Google Books).
One of the crucial yardsticks by which we shall have to judge the results of the new abortion law combined with the voluntary sterilisation law will be whether it tends to raise or lower the total quality of our population. We must encourage those who earn less than $200 p.m. and cannot afford to nurture and educate many children never to have more than two. Intelligent application of these laws can help reduce the distortion that has already set in. Until the less educated themselves are convinced and realise that they should concentrate their limited resources on one or two to give their children the maximum chance to climb up the education ladder, their children will always be at the bottom of economic scale.
It is unlikely that the results will be discernible before five years. Nor will the effect be felt before fifteen to twenty years. But we will regret the time lost, if we do not now take the first tentative steps towards correcting a trend which can leave our society with a large number of the physically, intellectually and culturally anaemic.
Speech on the Abortion Bill, December 29th, 1969 (PDF).
How does the Malay in the kampong finds [sic] his way out into modernised civil society. If you create this .3% how does this create a new and just society? By becoming servants of the .3% who will have money to hire them to clean their shoes, open their motor-car doors?
Speech to Federal Parliament, May 27th, 1965 (PDF).
I’ve always wondered: why are the Jews so extraordinarily smart and why are the European Jews smarter than the Arab Jews? If you look at the Nobel Prize winners, they tend to be Ashkenazi Jews, not Sephardi Jews. (I was reading a book called The Jewish Mystique. It was recommended to me by a Jewish banker, an American Jew, a top American banker.) Its explanation, I did not know this, was that from the 10th to 11th century in Europe, in Ashkenazim, the practice developed of the rabbi becoming the most desirable son-in-law because he is usually the brightest in the flock. He can master Hebrew, he can master the local language and he can teach it. So he becomes the son-in-law of the richest and the wealthiest. He marries young, is successful, probably bright. He has large numbers of children and the brightest of his children will became the rabbi and so it goes on. It’s been going on for nine, ten centuries. The same thing did not happen among the Sephardis, they did not have this practice. So one had a different pattern of procreation from the other, and so we have today’s difference. That was his explanation.
The Catholic Church had a different philosophy. All the bright young men became Catholic priests and did not marry. Bright priests, celibate, produce no children. And the result of several generations of bright Fathers producing no children? Less bright children in the Catholic world.
In the older generations, the pattern of procreation was settled by economics and culture. The richer you are, the more successful you are, the more wives you have, the more children you have. That’s the way it was settled.
In TMHI (Google Books).
Look at the number of smart Teochews there are … just count them. Teo Chee Hean, Lim Hng Kiang, George Yeo, Lim Boon Heng. Is it a coincidence? In a Cabinet of 15, how do you explain that? For that matter, the Hakkas consider themselves very special too. They are tough, resourceful, they were latecomers who got squeezed to the mountainous areas of the south when they came from the north. They were the only Chinese group that did not bind their women’s feet, because they lived on hilly terrain, had to make a living and couldn’t afford to have women with feet bound. You also have more Hakkas in the Cabinet than are represented in the population. They are supposed to be harder-working, tougher and therefore higher-achievers. So there are these differences even within the races.
In TMHI (Google Books).
I visited Europe during my vacation (as a student) and then saw India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Indonesia, Japan, Germany … You look for societies which have been more successful and you ask yourself why. On my first visit to Germany, in 1956, we had to stop in Frankfurt on our way to London. We had [earlier] stopped in Rome. This languid Italian voice over the loudspeaker said something … And there were Italian workers trundling trolleys at the airport. It was so relaxed, the atmosphere and the pace of work.
Then the next stop was Frankfurt. And immediately, the climate was a bit cooler and chillier. And a voice came across the loudspeaker: “Achtung! Achtung!” The chaps were the same, porters, but bigger-sized and trundling away. These were people who were defeated and completely destroyed and they were rebuilding. I could sense the goal, the dynamism.
Then Britain – well, they were languid, gentlemanly. With welfare, the British workers were no longer striving. They were getting West Indians to do the dirty jobs as garbage collectors, dustmen, conductors. They were still drivers because that was highly paid, the conductors were paid less.
So one was looking for a soft life, the other was rebuilding and pushing. That made a vivid impression, a very deep impression on me.
I also visited Switzerland when I was a student in ’47, ’48, on holiday. I came down by train from Paris to Geneva. Paris was black bread, dirty, after the war. I arrived at Geneva that morning, sleeping overnight. It was marvellous. Clean, beautiful, swept streets, nice buildings, marvellous white pillowcases and sheets, white bread after dark dirty bread and abundant food and so on. But hardworking, punctilious, the way they did your bed and cleaned up your rooms. It told me something about why some people succeed and some people don’t. Switzerland has a small population. If they didn’t have those qualities, they would have been overrun and Germany would have taken one part and the French another, the Italians would have taken another part. And that’s the end of them.
… the Japanese. Yes, I disliked their bullying and their hitting people and torturing people [during the Japanese Occupation], a brutal way of dealing with people. But they have admirable qualities. And in defeat, I admired them. For weeks, months, they were made, as prisoners, to clean the streets in Orchard Road, Esplanade and I used to watch them. Shirtless, in their dirty trousers but doing a good job. You want me to clean up? Okay, I clean up, that’s my job. None of this reluctance, you know, and humiliated shame. My job is to clean up; all right, I clean up. I think that spirit rebuilt Japan. It was a certain attitude to life. That assured their success.
In TMHI (Google Books).
Genes cannot be created, right? Unless you start tinkering with it as they may be able to do one day. But the culture you can tinker with. It’s slow to change, but it can be changed – by experience – otherwise human beings will not survive. If a certain habit does not help survival, well, you must quickly unlearn that habit.
So I’ve got to try and get Singaporeans to emulate or to adopt certain habits and practices which will make Singapore succeed. If you go and act like the Italians and wander around gradually, take your own sweet time, trundling luggage, you are not going to have a good airport that can compete with other people in the world. You’ve got to hustle and bustle, now, get on with it! Clear the baggage quickly!
In TMHI (Google Books).
This poses an extremely delicate problem. We tried over the last nine years systematically to provide free education from primary school right up to university for any Singapore citizen who is a Malay. This is something we don’t give to the majority ethnic group – the Chinese. They pay fees from secondary school onwards. We don’t find it necessary to do it for the other ethnic minorities, because broadly speaking, they are making similar progress as the Chinese. All are achievement-orientated, striving, acquisitive communities.
The reluctant conclusion that we have come to after a decade of the free education policy is that learning does not begin in school. It starts in the home with the parents and the other members of the family. Certainly the adoption of values comes more from the home, the mother, than the teacher. This means change will be a slow process. It can be accelerated in some cases by our judicious intermingling of the communities so that, thrown into the more multiracial milieu we have in our new housing estates, Malay children are becoming more competitive and more striving.
Speech to Southeast Asia Business Committee, May 12th, 1968 (PDF).
I do not believe that the American system of solving the problem stands any chance. First, they deny that there is a difference between the blacks and the whites. Once you deny that, then you’re caught in a bind.
In TMHI (Google Books).
The only way we can all really be physiologically equal in brain power and everything else is to have a melange. All go into a melting pot and you stir it. In other words, force mixed marriages, which is what the people in Zanzibar tried. The blacks wanted to marry all the Arab girls so that the next generation, their children, will be half-Arab. But I don’t think that’s a practical way nor will it solve the problem. And you can’t do that worldwide, you can – maybe you can do that in Zanzibar. In the process, you diminish Zanzibar.
Because whereas before you had some outstanding people who can do things for Zanzibar, now you have brought them down to a lower level.
In TMHI (Google Books).
In large areas of the world, a cultural pattern (is) determined by many things, including climatic conditions. As long as that persists, nothing will ever emerge. And for it to emerge, there must be this desire between contending factions of the “have” nations to try and mould the “have-not” nations after their own selves. If they want that strongly enough, competition must act as an accelerator, and no more than an accelerator to the creation of modern, industrial, technological societies in the primitive agricultural regions of the world. …
I think Asia can be very clearly demarcated into several distinct parts — East Asia is one: it has got a different tempo of its own. So have South Asia and Southeast Asia. I think this is crucial to an understanding of the possibilities of either development for the good or development which is not in the interest of peace and human happiness in the region.
I like to demarcate — I mean not in political terms — demarcate them half in jest, but I think half with some reality on the basis of difference in the tempo according to the people who know what these things are. I mean East Asia: Korea, Japan and mainland China and including the Republic of China in Taiwan and Vietnam. They are supposed to be Mahayana Buddhists. And then there is Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Ceylon, which are supposed to be Hinayana Buddhists. According to the Hinayana Buddhists, if the bedbug disturbs you then you take your mattress and shake it off; there is that compassion not only for the human being but for the bedbug, and you give it another chance and you let it off. Either it finds its way on to some other creature or it finds its way back to your bed. But watching the Japanese over the years, I have not the slightest doubt that is not what they do. And I think this makes some difference. I am not talking now -isms or ideologies. It is something deeper. It is part of the tempo, the way of life.
1967 Speech to Foreign Correspondents Association, March 21st, 1967 (PDF).
I am sufficiently sanguine about the future because if you look at the history of the region you will find that these were not cultures which created societies capable of intense discipline, concentrated effort, over sustained periods. Climate, the effects of relatively abundant society and the tropical conditions produced a people largely extrovert, easy going and leisurely. They’ve got their wars, they have their periods of greatness when the Hindus came in the 7th and again in the 12th centuries, in the Majapahit and the Srivijaya empires. But in between the ruins of Borubudur and what you have of Indonesia today, you see a people primarily self-indulgent. And I think that is a source of considerable comfort to us because we are much smaller than they are.
You have different peoples in other climates in other countries. Now, you have the Germans, for example, a different breed of men with a different cultural milieu, and they for some reason or the other always believed in destiny, that somehow God had chosen them to produce a better type of race in order to lift up standards in the world, and that they have the answer. And there are capable of extreme effort over very sustained periods, and with very high standards of individual performance. Now this being so, I suggest that the future is not necessarily bleak provided we can keep external powers from getting into Southeast Asia.
Speech to Canterbury University, Christchurch, New Zealand, March 15th, 1965 (PDF).
We have create [sic] this out of nothingness, from 150 souls in a minor fishing village into the biggest metropolis 2 degrees north of the Equator. There is only one other civilization near the Equator that ever produced anything worthy of its name. That was in the Yucatan Peninsula of South America — the Mayan Civilization. There is no other place where human beings were able to surmount the problems of a soporific equatorial climate. You can go along the Equator or 2 degrees north of it, and they all sleep after half past two-if they have had a good meal. They do! Otherwise, they must die earlier. It is only in Singapore that they don’t.
And there were good reason for this. First, good glands, and second, good purpose.
Speech at Raffles Hotel, February 7th, 1967 (PDF).
Industrial status can be achieved only if new value systems and behaviour patterns are grafted on the old. It is in part the difference between the more intense and exacting Sinic cultures of East Asia and the less intense and less demanding values of Hindu culture of South and South-east Asia, that accounts for the difference in industrial progress between Eastern and Southern Asia.
The softer and more benign Hindu civilisation spread through Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, meeting the Sinic civilisation on the borders of Vietnam, hence the name, the Indo-China Peninsula. ...
Lee Kuan Yew Quotes On Defence
Gunnar Myrdal, in his “Asian Drama,” voluminously sets out the reasons for lower achievements amongst these peoples. He terms them “soft societies.” Their expectations and desire for achievement are lower.
Lee Kuan Yew Quotes Philippines
Had he studied the Sinic civilisations of East Asia — Korea, Japan, China and Vietnam — he would have come to the opposite conclusions, that these were hard societies.
Commemorative Lecture at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, “East and West, the Twain Have Met”, November 8th, 1971 (PDF).
if it turns out that nature as much as nurture decides the level of achievement, then some system of incentives and disincentives must be found to make sure that, in each succeeding generation, standards of education and skill, levels of performance and achievement, will rise both as a result of nature and of nurture.
Whether it is genes, or the the environment, or both, to catch up with the technology and match the capital accumulation of the developed, the problem of population control must be squarely faced. The solutions once decided upon must be vigorously implemented.
Id.
it is only the East Asians who are self-confident when dealing with the West. Both (Japan and China) have put satellites into orbit, which only America, Russia and France have done. …
They are both confident that it is only a matter of decades before they are equal to most of the West.
Meanwhile in the less developed countries of South and South-east Asia, disillusionment and near despair has set in because of their failure to make the grade.
Id.
These are realities we have to weigh when deploying anyone to a sensitive appointment in the SAF. We must never put the person in a situation where he may face a conflict of loyalties. I said in answer to a question some nearly two years ago that it is a difficult matter to put a Malay Muslim of deeply religious family background in charge of a machine-gun. We should never have to ask this of anyone. Some of you were disturbed by my frankness. But when I faced crises in the 1960s I could not afford to be wrong. Was this discrimination or was it common sense – a policy of prudence? …
For nearly every job, a person’s race and religion are irrelevant. But in the security services, because of our context, we cannot ignore race and religion in deciding suitability.
In the early days, many Malay Singaporeans were not called up for NS. When NS started in 1967, race relations were fragile and tenuous, after the riots of 1964 and separation in 1965. The government could not ignore race tensions, simply recruit all young Malays and Chinese and have them do military training side by side. Israeli instructors would have been involved in the training of Malay/Muslim servicemen at a time of Muslim-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. So we did not recruit every Malay male, unless we were confident his participation in NS would not be a problem. Even then there was no blanket ban against Malays in the SAF. We have progressed as circumstances have changed. By the 1980s, we were confident enough to offer SAF undergraduate awards to Malays.
Speech at Dialogue Session with AMP & Majlis Pusat, March 2nd, 2001, (page).
The last four quotes below are from non-establishment sources. To me, these last four quotes are every bit as good as those above, but I have decided to keep them separate, so as to minimise any chance of undermining the credibility of the above quotes. After all, there are still many Singaporeans who only trust establishment sources.
Indeed, I found myself in agreement with three-quarters of [Mahathir’s] analysis of the problem – that the Malays had always withdrawn from competition and never really entered into the mainstream of economic activity; that the Malays would always get their children or relatives married off, regardless of whether it was good or bad. And I realised suddenly that his views were not those of political expediency, that they were firmly held beliefs as a result of his medical training and that he was not likely to change them.
The New Straits Times, October 17th, 1989 (PNG).
Three women were brought to the Singapore General Hospital, each in the same condition and each needing a blood transfusion. The first, a Southeast Asian was given the transfusion but died a few hours later. The second, a South Asian was also given a transfusion but died a few days later. The third, an East Asian, was given a transfusion and survived. That is the X factor in development.
At the University of Singapore, December 27th, 1967, as reported by Chandra Muzaffar in his letter to [Michael D. Barr], August 14th, 1996. (Quoted in Michael D. Barr, 1999, “Lee Kuan Yew: Race, Culture and Genes”, Journal of Contemporary Asia, [PDF].)
Any doctor will tell you in our hospitals, that even if you just touch an Indian with an injection he is howling. The Chinaman isn’t. He has got a very high tolerance for pain …
When doing a project [the British] would put the Chinese in the middle and put the Indians at the side, and the Indians were expected to keep the pace of the Chinese. And there was a hell of a problem, because one Chinese would carry one pole with two wicker baskets of earth, whereas two Indians would carry one pole with one wicker basket between them. So it’s one quarter. Now that’s culture. Maybe it has to do with genetic characteristics, I’m not sure.
Quoted in Michael D. Barr, The Ruling Elite of Singapore: Networks of Power and Influence (Google Books).
This last story is purely hearsay, from a personal conversation I had with a journalist friend of mine at The Straits Times [paraphrased]:
I remember a story by a colleague who interviewed him for Hard Truths. He said after one interview, in which LKY’s views on race astounded my colleague so much, as they were preparing to leave the room and recording had been turned off, my colleague casually asked LKY if in his mind he had a pecking order of races … like in the order of intelligence. And to his amazement, LKY did.
It was Jews at the top; whites and Chinese tied right after that; and I can’t remember who it was further down. All this is not on public record and is purely based on my colleague’s memory.
Another story from the same colleague: LKY had a thing about interracial marriage. He thinks there are three or four main groups of races and each group should marry within the group and not across groups. The groups are white, black, yellow, and brown. He literally said that.
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About Lee Kuan Yew
Lee Kuan Yew CH GCMG SPMJ (16 September 1923 – 23 March 2015), commonly referred to by his initials LKY, was the first Prime Minister of Singapore, governing for three decades.
Famous Lee Kuan Yew quotes
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1
If you deprive yourself of outsourcing and your competitors do not, you’re putting yourself out of business. Lee Kuan Yew
2
The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts. Lee Kuan Yew
3
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. Lee Kuan Yew
4
If Singapore is a nanny state, then I am proud to have fostered one. Lee Kuan Yew
5
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. Lee Kuan Yew
6
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. Lee Kuan Yew
7
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. Lee Kuan Yew
8
I know if I rest, I’ll slide downhill fast. Lee Kuan Yew
9
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. Lee Kuan Yew
10
The exuberance of democracy leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions which are inimical to development. Lee Kuan Yew
11
Lee Hsien Loong Speech
China is a vast, disparate country; there is no alternative to strong central power. Lee Kuan Yew
12
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. Lee Kuan Yew
13
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. Lee Kuan Yew
14
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
15
Let the historians and the Ph.D. students work out their doctrines. I’m not interested in theories per se. Lee Kuan Yew
16
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. Lee Kuan Yew
17
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. Lee Kuan Yew
18
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. Lee Kuan Yew
19
You need a certain standard of literacy, moral and ethical values, to be able to run a one man, one vote system. Lee Kuan Yew
20
I always tried to be correct, not politically correct. Lee Kuan Yew
21
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. Lee Kuan Yew
22
At the end of the day, is Singapore society better or worse off? That’s the test. Lee Kuan Yew
23
Peace and security both in Europe and in the Pacific still depend on a balance of power. Lee Kuan Yew
24
How do I comfort myself? Well, I say, ‘Life is just like that.’ Lee Kuan Yew
Quotes Of Lee Kuan Yew
25
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. Lee Kuan Yew
26
The enduring lesson is war is a disaster. Whoever wins, tremendous loss of life, property – a set back for civilisation. Lee Kuan Yew
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