Mahathir Mohamad Quotes

If you can't be famous, at least you can be notorious.

Knowledge has always been important, of course. The ancient Egyptians did not raise the stones for the pyramids relying on the incantations of their gods. The waters in the irrigation canals of the great Indus Civilisation did not flow according to the laws of ignorance. Knowledge has always been power and wealth.

We need an opposition to remind us if we are making mistakes. When you are not opposed you think everything you do is right.

I not only think but also look and study things carefully. When I travel around, I look at things carefully, make comparisons of what I see. I don't accept things at face value, you cannot trust what you hear or see. Don't jump to conclusions without thinking.

I'm brash and abrasive but that's because I've noticed when people are nice and polite they never get anywhere.

I cannot keep quiet even when I am a lone voice.

Any organisation has a future, provided it is properly led and it sticks to the objective of that organisation.

No one should have extra influence on an organisation. We should always regard ourselves as equals in the organisation, and we should be concerned about each other's problems.

If you know each other well, you want to do business with people you know well. You don't do business with strangers.

When I became Prime Minister, I looked back on what was done before – what were the policies and actions before – and I thought that I need to be critical if I’m going to do anything at all.

I'm a fundamentalist in the true sense. That is to say, I follow the fundamentals of religion... But for over 1,400 years people have been interpreting and re-interpreting the religion to suit their own purpose! ... These [extremist and terrorist acts] are not Islamic fundamentals any more than the Christians who burned people at the stake are fundamentalist. They are actually deviating from the teachings of the religion!

The Malays are spiritually inclined, tolerant and easy-going. The non-Malays, and especially the Chinese, are materialistic, aggressive and have an appetite for work. For equality to come about, it is necessary that these strikingly contrasting races adjust to each other.

Membership of an organisation is good, as long as you can make yourself heard.

Developing countries like Malaysia should have a say in changing the world financial system since we have faced the problems that it has caused.

History should remember Blair and Bush as the killers of children, or as the lying prime minister and president.

Some people say that we here have no freedom of religion, ... In reality, the people in that country are the ones who were forced to embrace a religion.

When you have elections in which 90% or 95% or 99% of those elected come from one party, then I think there is some fraudulent act.

Currency trading is unnecessary, unproductive and totally immoral. It should be stopped.

Most developing countries would know Malaysia quite well. Why? It is because we believe in contacts. We offer them some help for training, for example. We call it 'technical cooperation'.

Once started, religious strife has a tendency to go on and on - to become permanent feuds. Today we see such intractable inter-religious wars in Northern Ireland, between Jews and Muslims and Christians in Palestine, Hindus and Muslims in South Asia and in many other places. Attempts to bring about peace have failed again and again. Always the extremist elements invoking past injustices, imagined or real, will succeed in torpedoing the peace efforts and bringing about another bout of hostility.

Malaysians, during the colonial period, were not given the top positions: we were always subordinate. Fortunately for us, the people who took over were mainly civil servants: people who were serving the Government.

I know the situation of the Commonwealth generally, and I know that the aim should be to make the Commonwealth much more relevant to the poorer countries.

I thought that the United Nations is a creature of the five super-powers who were given veto powers. I don't like veto powers at all.

The Commonwealth is a mixture of developing and developed world, in which the developed countries were very influential and their policies hold sway most of the time.

Even in South Africa, the Commonwealth were not doing anything, and their attitude was to tolerate apartheid in South Africa. There was a lot of lip service being paid to the need to stop this practice, but nothing was done.