新加坡前总理李光耀说过哪些发人深省的名言？ 第1页

关于李光耀的名言录还是看英文原版的比较好，比翻译成中文的更纯正。推荐这本THE WIT & WISDOM OF Lee Kuan Yew [1923-2015]，记录了李光耀1955年从政以来到他去世之前所有发人深省的名言，是一本不可多得的，可以帮助提高英文写作和表达能力的李光耀语录，在新加坡本地的书店或者亚马逊上都能买到。

摘抄其中几句和几段名言：

1. I do not yet know of a man who became a leader as a result of having undergone a leadership course.
2. The weakness of democracy is that the assumption that all men are equal and capable of equal contribution to the common good is flawed.
3. Every generation has a quota of those who feel that society does not give them the status, the position, the influence, the rewards, that they deserve. They want to overturn the order of things.
4. You're talking about Rwanda or Bangladesh, or Cambodia, or the Philippines. They've got democracy ... But have you got a civilized life to lead? People want economic development first and foremost. The leaders may talk something else. You take a poll of any people. What they want? The right to write an editorial as you like? They want homes, medicine, jobs, schools.
5. From my observation, the monolinguist is more likely to be a language chauvinist and a bigot. He only sees the world through one eye. He does not have binocular vision to see the world in depth, to realise that there are as rich, if not richer, worlds of human experience and knowledge, all expressed in beautiful words, elegantly, vividly and fluently in other languages. He does not understand other great civilisations which have expressed themselves in other languages.
6. We cannot measure our happiness just by our GDP growth. It is how our families and friends care for each other, how we look after our old and nurture our young, they are what make for a closely knit society, one we can be proud to belong to.
7. I have been accused of many things in my life, but not even my worst enemy has ever accused me of being afraid to speak my mind.
8. If govenrment workers are adequately paid, they deserved to be punished with severe penalties when they take bribes.
9. Even in the capitalist West where they have tried throwing money at problems, what is the end result? You go down New York, Broadway. You will see the beggars, people on the streets. Worse than in the 1950s and in the early ’60s before the Great Society programmes. Why? Why did it get worse after compassion moved a President, motivated with a great vision of a society which was wealthy and cared for, could look after everybody – the blacks, the minorities, the dispossessed, the disadvantaged. There is more unhappiness and more hardship today and more beggars, more muggers. Why is that? Have we not learnt? Where are the beggars in Singapore? Show me. I take pride in that. Has anybody died of starvation? Anybody without a home left to die in the streets and have to be collected as dead corpses? Because we came to the realistic conclusion that the human being is motivated by instincts that go deep down into the basic genes of life. And the first basic instinct is to protect yourself, and stronger than that, to protect your offspring so that there is the next generation. You kill that link, you have killed off mankind.
10. How do you think today's Singapore came about? Becasue everyone knows if I say that we are going in a certain directoin and that we're going to achieve this objective, if you set out to block me, I will take a bulldozer and clear the obstruction. I leave nobody in any doubt that is where we are going and that any obstruction wiil be cleared. So there were very few obstructions. So we got the highway cleared and travelled to our destination.