Desmond Tutu Quotes

Famine is about so much more than food: it is about a famine of education, democracy, health, transport, and so many other items. The food famine becomes a symptom of that vast failure.

The other aspect is that you become much more aware of the structural problems that pertain to that continent. You feel the need to act to try and solve them.

I really try to focus on organizations, twofold, one that help people and/or beings that don't have other means of help. Particularly if they're hospitalized children, sick children, children that don't have homes, children that can't go to school, you know that's the future of this country and the future of this planet.

Haiti is 10.4-million people, of whom 35 per cent are children under 15. The country has always had great potential - and this is still the case. Our ill fortune has long been a matter of bad governance. And now things have changed.

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

We can't stop a baby in Africa from starving to death... but we can afford enough technology and weaponry to blow the world up a million times over.

I am concerned about Africa. You can’t have 600 million people of one identifiable ethnicity going backwards and the rest of the world going forwards.

The people are starving. They need food; they need medicine; they need education. They do not need a skyscraper to house the ruling party and a 24-hour TV station.

How many more infants must die every day in Africa because resources are being swallowed up in debt repayment.

The fry of wandering beggars that grow up idly and hurtfully and burdenous to the Realm, might be unladen and better bred up.

All children, regardless of their income, ethnicity, or geography have the right to be protected and be given the opportunity to reach their full potential, which is why our global HSNi Cares partner is the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

Poverty and ignorance, which beget terror, are not eradicated by firing artillery shells. Borders do not stop rockets, and barbed wire does not prevent terror.

The truth is that Africa is like everywhere else. There are poor areas, there are rich areas, there is a middle class. Some of those areas are bigger in one country than another, and some countries have real problems that they're working through. But there's great people, good people and a small percentage of bad people - just like everywhere else.

Africa doesn't look like it's changed that much to me since I first went in '94. There is still a major economic divide, but the rights of Africans have changed and progressed.

Most people only see Africa in terms of poverty and war, famine and disease.

I refuse to accept that the world is so poor, when just one week of global spending on armies is enough to bring all of our children into classrooms.

The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death.

Crimes increase as education, opportunity, and property decrease. Whatever spreads ignorance, poverty and, discontent causes crime.... Criminals have their own responsibility, their own share of guilt, but they are merely the hand.... Whoever interferes with equal rights and equal opportunities is in some real degree, responsible for the crimes committed in the community.

We need a Nuremberg to put on trial the economic order that they have imposed on us, that every three years kills more men, women and children by hunger and preventable or curable diseases than the death toll in six years of the second world war.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.

All around the world, there are children wishing they had some cool sneakers like you do. But before you decide to give them your old pair, they'd first like a decent meal, some fluid, and some medication so they can walk comfortably in your shoes.

With a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the Iraq war, the US and Australia could ensure every starving, sunken-eyed child on the planet could be well fed, have clean water and sanitation and a local school to go to.

The greatest triumph of our educational method should always be this: to bring about the spontaneous progress of the child.

Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.