You take a poll of any people. What is it they want? The right to write an editorial as you like? They want homes, medicine, jobs, schools.

Political reform need not go hand in hand with economic liberalization.. I hold unconventional views about this.. I do not believe if you are a libertarian, full of diverse opinions, full of competing ideas in the market place, full of sound and fury, therefore you will succeed.

I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been... But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I've come to.

Having an education is one thing, being educated is another.

Without the elected president and if there is a freak result, within two or three years, the army would have to come in and stop it.

You know, the cure for all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government. You get that alternative and you'll never put Singapore together again: Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again... my asset values will disappear, my apartments will be worth a fraction of what they were, my ministers' jobs will be in peril, their security will be at risk and their women will become maids in other people's countries, foreign workers.

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.