Famous quotes by Lee Kuan Yew:

"Well, I think if I had married a different woman I would of had a very different life. She was my partner both emotionally and intellectually. At work and at play and she brought up the 3 children that we have, brought them up to be well behaved, modest and not over-bearing children."

"I learnt how people survived and how people had to submit because you need to eat and your family need to live, so I learned the meaning of power. In a sense that power comes out in the barrel of a gun and when the Japanese gun was not as big as the American gun they surrendered and the British came back."

"I don't think I made a conscious decision as a career choice. From my school days I had decided, persuaded by my parents, to prepare myself for the law. Then the Japanese occupation came and we went through three and a half years of what I would call the university of life, it was hard, it was harsh."

"I want a world-class opposition, not a riff-raff."

"I'm not as active as before; but enough to fight an election."

"It's a law which is approved of by Singapore's inhabitants and which allows us to reduce the drug problem,"

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

"Yes, we knew that sooner or later, with the build up in the Philippines, in Indonesia and after the KKM arrests in Malaysia that they were bound to penetrate us."

"Few doubt the U.S. will act to remove [Saddam] unless he hands over weapons of mass destruction."

"Look at the numbers and quality of the engineers and scientists they produce and you know that this is where the R&D; will be done. The Chinese have a space program, they are going to put a man on the moon and nobody sold them that technology."

"The big nest was in Afghanistan, thats not quite cleared, then there are nests in the Philippines, there are nests in Indonesia, the Malaysians are clearing up their nests."

"Of-course we did, but we didn't reply because we knew once this leaks the others will scatter, so in the few days we moved quickly before the press got hold of it. The press did get hold of it a few days later, we nabbed, we were able to get 15, the others got away."

"I knew that my niece was working nearby with some bank, so my wife rang up the mother and the mother called back to say that shes just called up to say she was alright."

"I was a product of the times, the war, the occupation, the reoccupation, my 4 years in Britain, admiring but at the same time questioning whether they are able to do a better job than we can."

"Well if done a lot of hard work to try and get people to act rationally, the fact that weve had 15 deviant Muslims, plus 5 or 8 others that got away does not mean that all Muslims are deviant or extremists."