Quotes from Lee Hsien Loong

We are not in a situation where the minorities are demanding something and the majorities are pushing back saying 'We don't want it.'

The Chinese are quite clear what their interests are and very consistent on pushing their interests.

Whichever country we are talking to, we are concerned with economic cooperation, how to deepen our mutual dependence, how to find new areas of win-win.

We are open to the world; the world is at our doorstep. It washes in, not just through the windows, but we are immersed in it completely - through the Internet, through the media, through people traveling, coming here, as well as Singaporeans going abroad.

In every American election, crazy things are said. Positions are taken which the winners try very hard to forget afterwards.

If you interview world leaders, everybody will say they are for free trade. But what they mean by it and what they do when they say they are pro free trade, you have to watch and see.

You need people who have their own views, whose views you respect, whom you can have a productive disagreement with, and work out ideas which you might not have come up with, or who improve on ideas you had.

The old model for India was to be self-sufficient. It was the ideal India became independent with, that you spin your own thread, make your own clothes.

No government prospers by saying, 'I don't need to do anything. Just by being there, we have made the country thrive.'

You have to have a sense of what it looks like, not from the point of view of the policymaker but from the point of view of those who are at the receiving end of your policies.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

China has been developing, growing in economic strength and its influence in the region. That will continue.

We are happy to see China prospering; we are happy to see China playing a constructive and positive role in the region.

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.

The U.S. is not a claimant state in the South China Sea or in the China-Japan dispute over the Senkaku Islands. But, of course, the 7th Fleet has been a presence in the region since the Second World War, and it is the most powerful fleet in the region.

To represent the nation, you must have multiracial representation.

You have to have an idea of what you need to do, what needs to be fixed, what can be improved, what we should now imagine together which we didn't previously imagine. And having thought of it, decide to go it. And that's the government's role.

Singapore needs to be able to continue to add value to China in order for the relationship to be worthwhile for both sides.