From Third World to First Quotes

“To straddle the middle ground and win elections, we have to be in charge of the political agenda. This can only be done by not being beaten in the argument with our critics. They complain that I come down too hard on their arguments. But wrong ideas have to be challenged before they influence public opinion and make for problems. Those who try to be clever at the expense of the government should not complain if my replies are as sharp as their criticisms.”
― Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000

“Start with putting three of your friends to jail. You definitely know what for, and people will believe you”
― Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000

“I always tried to be correct, not politically correct.”
― Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000

“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, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000

“The future is as full of promise as it is fraught with uncertainty.”
― Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000

“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, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000

“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, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000

“All leaders were equal at the conference table, but those from heavyweight countries showed that they were more equal by arriving in big private jets, the British in their VC 10s and Comets, and the Canadians in Boeings. The Australians joined this select group in 1979, after Malcolm Fraser's government purchased a Boeing 707 for the Royal Australian Air Force. Those African presidents whose countries were then better off, like Kenya and Nigeria, also had special aircraft. I wondered why they did not set out to impress the world that they were poor and in dire need of assistance. Our permanent representative at the UN in New York explained that the poorer the country, the bigger the Cadillacs they hired for their leaders. So I made a virtue of arriving by ordinary commercial aircraft, and thus helped preserve Singapore's third World status for many years. However, by the mid-1990s, the World Bank refused to heed our pleas not to reclassify us as a "High Income Developing Country", giving no Brownie points for my frugal travel habits. We lost all the concessions that were given to developing countries.”
― Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000

“We faced tremendous odds with an improbable chance of survival. Singapore was not a natural country but man-made, a trading post the British had developed into a nodal point in their worldwide maritime empire. We inherited the island without its hinterland, a heart without a body.”
― Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000

“It does not pay to yield to popular pressure beyond our capacity to deliver.”
― Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000

“The trip down the Yangtze from Chongqing (formerly Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek's World War II capital in Sichuan) to Yichang at the exit of the gorges took one and a half days. To look up and see, high up on the perpendicular surface of sheer rock, huge Chinese characters carved thousands of years ago to commemorate events and ideas was to be awed.”
― Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000

“The trip down the Yangtze from Chongqing (formerly Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek's World War II capital in Sichuan) to Yichang at the exit of the gorges took one and a half days. To look up and see, high up on the
perpendicular surface of sheer rock, huge Chinese characters carved thousands
of years ago to commemorate events and ideas was to be awed.”
― Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000