We have over a hundred political detainees, men against whom we are unable to prove anything in a court of law. Nearly 50 of them are men who gave us a great deal of anxiety during the years of Confrontation because they were Malay extremists. Your life and this dinner would not be what it is if my colleagues and I had decided to play it according to the rules of the game.

Please do not assume that you can change governments. Young people don’t understand this.

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

I do not yet know of a man who became a leader as a result of having undergone a leadership course.

I pointed to an article with bold headlines reporting that the police had refused to allow the PAP to hold a rally at Empress Place, and then to the last paragraph where in small type it added the meeting would take place where we were now. I compared this with a prominent report about an SPA rally. This was flagrant bias.

If you deprive yourself of outsourcing and your competitors do not, you're putting yourself out of business.

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