20 Kutipan Terkenal Lee Kuan Yew yang Penuh Motivasi

Lee Kuan Yew meninggal dunia dalam usia 91 tahun. Berikut ini adalah 20 kutipan terkenalnya yang penuh motivasi

Dunia kehilangan salah satu tokoh yang paling berpengaruh dalam beberapa dekade terakhir. Founding father dan Perdana Menteri pertama dari Singapura, [outbound_link text="Lee Kuan Yew" link="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew"] menghembuskan nafas terakhirnya pada hari Senin, 23 Maret 2015 pada pukul 03.18 di Singapura General Hospital. Lee Kuan Yew meninggal dunia di usia 91 tahun.

[read_more link="http://www.duniaku.net/2015/03/24/belasungkawa-wafatnya-lee-kuan-yew/" title="Ungkapan Belasungkawa dari Para Pemimpin Dunia atas Wafatnya Lee Kuan Yew"]

Lee Kuean Yew berhasil mengubah Singapura dari hanya sebuah pulau kecil menjadi sebuah negara yang maju dengan pesat. Bahkan, Singapura menjadi salah satu negara yang kaya dan menjadi salah satu pusat bisnis di kawasan Asia, bahkan dunia. Kerja keras dan visi Lee Kuan Yew dalam membangun Singapura ini seingkali menjadi teladan bagi para pemimpin bangsa lainnya.

Semasa hidupnya, Lee Kuan Yew memiliki banyak [outbound_link text="quote" link="http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/03/23/us/ap-as-singapore-lee-kuan-yew-quote-box.html?_r=0"] terkenal yang menjadi pegangan banyak pemimpin saat ini, yang sebagian besar dituangkan dalam buku-buku karyanya. Berikut ini 20 diantaranya yang sangat terkenal.

1. You call me a dictator. You are entitled to call me whatever you like, but that doesn't make me one . . . do I need to be a dictator when I can win, hands down? (interview dengan New York Times, 1999)
2. I'm very determined. If I decide what something is worth doing, then I'll put my heart and soul to it. The whole ground can be against me, but if I know it is right, I'll do it. That's the business of a leader. (Lee Kuan Yew, "The Man and His Ideas," 1998)
3. I have never been over concerned or obsessed with opinion polls or popularity polls. I think a leader who is, is a weak leader. Between being loved and being feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I'm meaningless. ("The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew," 1998)
4. Even from my sick bed, even if you are going to lower me into the grave, and I feel something is wrong, I will get up.
5. The task of the leaders must be to provide or create for them a strong framework within which they can learn, work hard, be productive and be rewarded accordingly. And this is not easy to achieve.
6. Life is not just eating, drinking, television and cinema…The human mind must be creative, must be self-generating; it cannot depend on just gadgets to amuse itself.
7. I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that’s the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils… I didn’t start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, and then bullying my way to the top, that is the conclusion I’ve come to.
8. I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn't be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn't be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters - who your neighbor is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think. (The Straits Times, April 20, 1987)
9. I do not yet know of a man who became a leader as a result of having undergone a leadership course.
10. I was a product of the times, the war, the occupation, the reoccupation, my 4 years in Britain, admiring but at the same time questioning whether they are able to do a better job than we can.
11. Singaporeans, if I can chose an analogy, we are the hard disk of a computer, the foreign talent are the megabytes you add to your storage capacity. So your computer never hangs because you got enormous storage capacity.
12. You know, the cure for all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government. You get that alternative and you’ll never put Singapore together again: Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again…
13. If you can’t force or are unwilling to force your people to follow you, with or without threats, you are not a leader.
14. With few exceptions, democracy has not brought good government to new developing countries…What Asians value may not necessarily be what Americans or Europeans value. Westerners value the freedoms and liberties of the individual.
15. Freedom of the press, freedom of the news media, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of the integrity of Singapore, and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government.
16. I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that’s the most unlikely thing ever to have been.
17. But we either believe in democracy or we not. If we do, then, we must say categorically, without qualification, that no restraint from the any democratic processes, other than by the ordinary law of the land, should be allowed… If you believe in democracy, you must believe in it unconditionally. If you believe that men should be free, then, they should have the right of free association, of free speech, of free publication. Then, no law should permit those democratic processes to be set at nought.
18. If Singapore is a nanny state, then I am proud to have fostered one.
19. I ignore polling as a method of government. I think that shows a certain weakness of mind – an inability to chart a course whichever way the wind blows, whichever way the media encourages the people to go, you follow.
20. Political reform need not go hand in hand with economic liberalisation. I do not believe that if you are libertarian, full of diverse opinions, full of competing ideas in the market place, full of sound and fury, therefore you will succeed.

Rencananya, upacara pemakaman Lee Kuan Yew akan dilaksanakan pada hari Minggu, 29 Maret 2015 mendatang dan dihadiri juga oleh Presiden Jokowi. Selamat jalan, Lee Kuan Yew..