Conferment Ceremony of the Public Service Star Awards

“If you who are growing up do not understand that you have to defend this, then in the end, we will lose. Other people will come, smack you down and take it over. And therefore we have decided, after very careful consideration – one-and-a-half years of careful consideration – that every boy and every girl will learn what it is necessary to defend this country.”

-At a Conferment Ceremony of the Public Service Star Awards at Toa Payoh Community Centre on 21 February 1967.