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.

Some suggestions for you :

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

China is developing very quickly. At every stage, its needs are different.

It is never helpful to point at sticking points, but it is always helpful to encourage one's partners to take a more active and forward-looking approach.

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

I think if you look at the Singapore projects, we wanted to do industrial parks. They have taken very long to clear the issues of land, and these become politicised, and you can't settle it, and eventually the project languishes and nothing happens.

We are looking for ways where you can have a sandbox, where you have a restricted environment within which people can try new things, and I can try new rules. And depending on what works, then I open up the sandbox, and it becomes the new rule for the whole system.

The tactics we were able to use in the 1960s, 1970s - let's have a campaign, mobilize everybody and, therefore, social pressure - stop littering, or stop spitting, or be courteous to one another: I am not sure that kind of approach will work anymore.

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

Criticism, any amount, we welcome it. Come, let's have a discussion - in Parliament, all the better.

If you asked a Singaporean, on the one hand they'll say, 'Let us do our own things.' On the other hand, when an issue comes out, they'll ask, 'What is the government doing about it?'

No country can be an island unto itself or world unto itself. Not even the biggest country.

Maybe Americans feel they don't need the rest of the world anymore, and they wish it would go away. We don't have that option.

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.

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