A leader without the vision, to strive to improve things, is no good. Then you will just stay put, you won't progress.

I have been accused of many things in my life, but not even my worst enemy has ever accused me of being afraid to speak my mind.

We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.

They say people can think for themselves? Do you honestly believe that the chap who can’t pass primary six knows the consequence of his choice when he answers a question viscerally, on language, culture and religion? But we knew the consequences. We would starve, we would have race riots. We would disintegrate.

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.

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.

If there was one formula for our success,it was that we were constantly studying how to make things work,or how to make them work better.