Quotable Quotes: MM Lee

This article was published in The New Paper on 23 March 2009:

MM Lee on Chinese students
By Ng Tze Yong

HIS WORDS

MM Lee: On Chinese students here

I'll be upfront. Most of the bright Chinese students use us as a stepping stone to move on to American schools...

So why are we so stupid?

Because more than half of them will not make the grade.

They will remain here. And the second tier is not bad for us.

On Beijing

You look at the Olympics.

The greening of Beijing was unbelievable.

From the airport to the city, just masses of trees, ferns, everything. Within the city, flowers everywhere.

40 million flower pots!

And they have the power to make the flowers blossom at the right time...

But where did the ideas come from? Tiny Singapore. Little red dot.

...so when you say I come from Singapore, I want to open a company, they say sure, no problem.

MM Lee: On single S'porean women

My daughter is one of them. What can I do?

When she was in her early 30s, I told her, never mind all this.

My wife and I used to tell her, what you want is a M, R, S - Mrs.

She didn't think it was funny. Now, she is 50-plus.

I'm getting old, I've got a pacemaker... We've got this big house, everything is looked after now, but what happens when we are no longer there?

Who's going to run this place? Who's going to make sure that the maids are doing the right thing and so on and so forth?

That's the price she will have to pay...

She says, I'll look after myself, but she has not been looking after herself all these years.

She went abroad for her studies... and her cooking was just to take the salmon and put it in the microwave and eat it up.

You can do it and then go to the canteen, but when you do that day after day...

It's a choice she has made and a choice that 35 per cent of our women are making.

Who am I to complain, except that society lives with the choices it makes?