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

Now if democracy will not work for the Russians, a white Christian people, can we assume that it will naturally work with Asians?

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.

I have no regrets. I have spent my life, so much of it, building up this country. There's nothing more that I need to do. At the end of the day, what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life.

As you solve one set of problems, new ones appear. That is part of the nature of life.

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.

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