Top 92 Quotes & Sayings by Lee Hsien Loong - Page 2

Basically, if you become president, you must swear to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and what the Constitution says.

I hope that soon after the next election, amongst them they will have decided, settled, and the leader will be ready to take over from me.

Singapore admires America's dynamism, vibrancy, and capacity for self-renewal. These qualities attract the best and brightest from around the world.

For trade to grow, India must make a strategic decision that you want to encourage interdependence and more openness and more trade-based economy.

I think if you look at the Singapore projects, we wanted to do industrial parks. They have taken very long to clear the issues of land, and these become politicised, and you can't settle it, and eventually the project languishes and nothing happens.

We have to work towards free trade because otherwise we will miss out on many opportunities for cooperation, and relations amongst countries will become much more difficult.

I do not owe hundreds of millions of potential foreign workers from around the world an obligation. I owe Singaporeans a responsibility.

If you don't have that Singapore core, you can top up the numbers, but you are no longer Singapore. It doesn't feel Singapore - it isn't Singapore - and we can issue everybody red passports, but where is the continuity?

There is always competition for influence, but there are also opportunities for cooperation.

Countries in Asia - Singapore, certainly, but many other countries too - are good friends to both China and America, and we would like to be good friends with both.

America excels not just through sheer individual talent but by working together with others.

To represent the nation, you must have multiracial representation.

You have to understand that Singapore is quite different from Mauritius.

You will always have politics being pushed towards multiracial politics because you have to field a team.

With Singaporeans, you speak English, you're well-educated, the doors open everywhere.

We are looking for ways where you can have a sandbox, where you have a restricted environment within which people can try new things, and I can try new rules. And depending on what works, then I open up the sandbox, and it becomes the new rule for the whole system.

You need to have good people: honourable, capable, committed in politics, standing in public office. It's not a guarantee, but it's the ideal we have to aim for.

There will always be frictions when you have a foreign worker population or immigrant population in the country, and we have to manage that, and that requires good behaviour and adjustment both on the part of the foreign workers and the immigrants as well as on the part of the Singaporeans.

If we have no foreign workers, our economy suffers; our own lives suffer.

If you make a defamatory allegation that the Prime Minister is guilty of criminal misappropriation of pension funds of Singaporeans, that's a very serious matter.

Nowadays, however strong an economy is, not all roads will lead only there. There will be other links between countries in Asia, with America, with Europe, and China will fit into this global network.

We do have to watch to see how the foreign workers and immigrants are fitting in with our community, and you have to watch them mix so that you don't overbalance the numbers or the tone of our society.

It takes time, but I have a promising team of younger Ministers, and I am quite sure from amongst them, one leader will emerge.

I don't have farmers I can convert into factory workers.

Over half a century working together on multiple issues, Singaporeans and Americans have made many enduring and close personal friendships.

You have an administration which understands America's international responsibilities and interests, but you have a population which is anxious, tired, and doesn't want to bear any burden and pay any price. And that's very difficult for whoever becomes president.

I thanked the President [George W. Bush] for the steadfastness and resolve with which he's tackling the very complicated problems in the Middle East and Iraq, as well as the Israel-Palestinian issue.... It's critical for us in Southeast Asia that America does that.... because it affects America's standing in Asia and the world, and also the security environment in Asia because extremists, the jihadists, watch carefully what's happening in the Middle East and take heart, or lose heart, depending on what's happening.

There is no policy too sensitive to question, and no subject so taboo that you cannot even mention it.

You put out a funny podcast, you talk about bak chor mee. I will say mee siam mai hum.

Our people should feel free to express diverse views, pursue unconventional ideas or simply be different.

People support CPF cuts because there are no protest outside parliament.

Beijing residents joke that to get a free smoke all they have to do is open their windows!