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Man needs a certain moral sense of right and wrong. There is such a thing called evil, and it is not the result of being a victim of society. You are just an evil man, prone to do evil things, and you have to be stopped from doing them.

— Lee Kuan Yew

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Good and Evil

More quotes by Lee Kuan Yew

India is a creation of the British Raj and the railway system it built, and therefore it has its limitations.

Lew Kuan Yew answers people in India during the South Asian Diaspora Convention (2011)

If Aljunied decides to go that way, well Aljunied has five years to live and repent.

If all the 300 (top civil servants and political elite) were to crash in one jumbo jet, then Singapore will disintegrate.

On how Singapore does not need multiparty politics (1975)

He took over, and he said: 'If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it.'

If Singapore is a nanny state, then I am proud to have fostered one.

All Lee Kuan Yew quotes →

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False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Socrates

I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.

Edward Teller

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

C. S. Lewis God in the Dock (1970)

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

Henry David Thoreau Walden (1854)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Lee Kuan Yew (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.