Lee Kuan Yew
Lee Kuan Yew was a statesman, politician, and autobiographer whose written memoir represents his most direct contribution to the documentary record of Singapore's political history.
Born in Singapore on 16 September 1923, Lee was educated at the University of Cambridge and qualified as a barrister. He worked as a lawyer before entering politics, conducting his public life across English, Chinese, and Malay. In 1959 he became the first Prime Minister of Singapore, a position he held until 1990. Alongside his roles as politician and statesman, he was also identified as a philosopher, and his work as an autobiographer placed his own account of his career into written form for subsequent readers and researchers.
Lee Kuan Yew died on 23 March 2015 at Singapore General Hospital in Singapore, the city in which he had been born ninety-one years earlier. His tenure as the first Prime Minister of Singapore, spanning 1959 to 1990, stands as the central fact of his public career, and his autobiography remains the record in which he set down his own perspective on those years in his own words.
Quotes by Lee Kuan Yew
Lee Kuan Yew's insights on:
Peace and security in the Asia-Pacific will turn on whether China emerges as a xenophobic, chauvinistic force, bitter and hostile to the West because it tried to slow down or abort its development, or whether it is educated and involved in the ways of the world - more cosmopolitan, more internationalized and outward looking.
Let the historians and the Ph.D. students work out their doctrines. I'm not interested in theories per se.
The original communitarianism of Chinese Confucian society has degenerated into nepotism, a system of family linkages, and corruption, on the mainland. And remnants of the evils of the original system are still found in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and even Singapore.
I can feel the gradual decline of energy and vitality. And I mean generally, every year, when you know you are not on the same level as last year. But that's life.
China itself is now in the process of sloughing off not only the communist system, but also those outdated parts of Confucianism that prevent the rapid acquisition of knowledge needed to adjust to new ways of life and work.