Keng Quotes & Sayings

The serene confidence with which Western journalists and liberal academics prescribe solutions to our [Singapore's] problems is a source of constant wonder to us. — Goh Keng Swee

We have an immigration system in this country that not only doesn't work, in many cases it doesn't even make any sense. — Kendrick Meek

Higher salaries were not the only way the government strove to staunch the bleeding. In the past, before admin salaries were raised, government leaders intervened when officers they considered key were targeted. Dr Goh Keng Swee, then still in the Cabinet, once told me: "We only let you take those we were prepared to release." In one celebrated case, in the early 1960s, he personally stepped in to stop one important hire. The paper's British management had recruited Herman Hochstadt, a rising young officer who later became permanent secretary. The morning he was to start work, even before he could settle in his chair at Times House, he found that Dr Goh had demanded his return to the civil service. — Cheong Yip Seng

No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down
impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book. — Muriel Rukeyser

Let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God. — Lysa TerKeurst

For me chivalry isn't dead; it's an involuntary reflex. — Jim Butcher

I mean, I hate when actors talk about how hard their job is. It's ridiculous, because we have the best job in the world. — Jon Bernthal

The only way to avoid making mistakes is not to do anything. And that will be the ultimate mistake. — Goh Keng Swee

Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come. — John Thorn

For Chuang Tzu, the truly great man is therefore not the man who has, by a lifetime of study and practice, accumulated a great fund of virtue and merit, but the man in whom "Tao acts without impediment," the "man of Tao." Several of the texts in this present book describe the "man of Tao." Others tell us what he is not. One of the most instructive, in this respect, is the long and delightful story of the anxiety-ridden, perfectionistic disciple of Keng Sang Chu, who is sent to Lao Tzu to learn the "elements." He is told that "if you persist in trying to attain what is never attained ... in reasoning about what cannot be understood, you will be destroyed. — Thomas Merton