by Lee Kuan Yew
567 remarks from Lee Kuan Yew, 1955–2012. Founding Prime Minister of Singapore. Architect of one of the twentieth century's most improbable state-building projects. Unsentimental about human nature, scornful of abstraction, and usually right.
tags: lee-kuan-yew, singapore, governance, geopolitics, democracy, pragmatism, leadership
Lee Kuan Yew
Prime Minister of Singapore · 1959 – 1990
“Those of us who sometimes talk of unity and confederation do not understand that Singapore is the shop window of Malaya. This is the little place where people come and do their buying and their selling. This is also the little laboratory where the British, the nationalists and the communists first try out their tactics, because if anything goes wrong, it goes wrong on a small scale.”
Lee Kuan Yew served as Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990 and remained in government as Senior Minister and then Minister Mentor until 2011. In 1965 he took a city of two million - no natural resources, no hinterland, freshly expelled from Malaysia, surrounded by larger and unstable neighbours - and turned it into one of the wealthiest states on earth. He did not do this by following received opinion about development, democracy, or human rights. He did it by being unusually clear-eyed about what actually worked.
The remarks collected here were selected from speeches, interviews, and parliamentary exchanges across fifty-seven years. They are not diplomatic. LKY had a consistent view of intellectuals who preferred elegant theories to uncomfortable facts, and he expressed it consistently.
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI