War & Peace Quote by Sellapan Ramanathan

“Peace, progress and prosperity” is the political equivalent of a perfectly framed stock photo: soothing, aspirational, and nearly content-free. S.R. Nathan’s choice to call it a “motherhood statement” is a small act of rhetorical puncturing from a man who spent his career inside the machinery that produces those slogans. He’s not rejecting the goals; he’s warning against the lazy consensus that forms around them.

The intent is managerial, almost surgical. By naming the phrase as a cliché, Nathan creates distance between governing and campaigning. He signals that real statecraft isn’t the recital of values everyone already applauds, but the trade-offs that come after the applause: who pays, who waits, what gets policed, what gets sacrificed. “All of us like it” carries a dry, knowing edge. Liking something is cheap; building it is expensive.

The subtext also maps neatly onto Singapore’s political culture, where legitimacy has often been argued through outcomes and stability rather than ideological romance. In that context, “peace” can imply social discipline as much as harmony; “progress” can mean technocratic change with strict guardrails; “prosperity” can obscure unequal gains or the anxieties of global competition. Nathan’s line is a reminder that consensus words can anesthetize public debate.

What makes it work is its understated deflation. He uses an almost domestic metaphor - “motherhood” - to expose how leaders weaponize virtue: the safer the phrase, the harder it is to challenge, and the easier it is to avoid the messy specifics that democracy (even managed democracy) is supposed to force into the open.