Bill Gates Quotes

I think the collision between the First and Third world is going to become more and more conspicuous. It's the big cliff that we've all got to climb.

Going to Liberia really changed a lot for me. I didn't realize what was happening on the same planet. My understanding that in the world everything is interconnected really grew - to go to one of the poorest countries from one of the richest countries in the world. It was two worlds apart.

I think that my work is my attempt, I suppose, is to try and become a piece of connective tissue. I'm trying to communicate with people here and in America - in rich countries - about what I see on the ground in badly affected areas.

While a handful of countries and a small number of people are leading ample life, dozens of countries and billions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America are being left in absolute poverty.

The 'Third World' is a term I don't like very much because we're all one world. I want people to know that the largest part of humanity is suffering.

You leave the States, and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you.

The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace.

I don't consider the first-world concerns any less important than the third-world ones.

I'd worked at the World Bank briefly as an undergrad and studied poverty levels around the world - particularly those earning less than $1.25 a day.

After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do.

In 1962, when I was 19, I visited India. With introductions from people involved in the U.S. civil rights movement, I was able to visit with several of the leading Gandhians there. The hundred-to-one difference in average per capita income between America and India at the time was a stark reality for the people who became my friends there.

Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.

As the earth spins through space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world - most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world's poor.

There is still a severe and scary amount of extreme poverty in rural parts of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma and sub-Saharan Africa.

It's such a different spectrum of tragedies when you talk to people in developing countries.

The problems of the Third World—its poverty, its ignorance, its debt—never really seemed to affect Europeans and Americans. No longer. It's a little warmer than it used to be. The water is rising.

The third world is important then, because it is made up its human beings, human beings who possess the same nature we do, people who are capable of suffering and desire and, even as we suffer and desire, people who are condemned to a shabby, deprived and disease ridden existence, and these are people for whom we have a moral and religious obligation to care about.

What separates developing countries from developed countries is as much a gap in knowledge as a gap in resources.

I often think that people who write a lot about poverty need to go and spend more time with poor people.

People in the U.K. don't imagine what it is to live in extreme poverty here in Colombia or anywhere in the so-called Third World.

An experience that shaped me happened early in my TV career when I filmed in Mozambique, Angola and Bangladesh for 'Blue Peter' and Comic Relief. Places with extreme poverty. When you see that first-hand as a young person, you take it with you for life.

When you get off to an African country like Malawi - which is pretty removed from everything and pretty seriously off the grid - and you see the struggle of life that goes on there, it's a completely different thing than what happens here.

I don't need a set of message board points to tell me that people are hurting in my state. I know it because I've lived it.

Being poor in Africa is something people in America can't relate to. Part of the challenge is bringing that reality to people and moving them. You have to arouse compassion.

Once you experience Third World poverty, you're really changed forever, if you're at all open to it, because we're all united in our common humanity. And we are so made as to feel something for people who are in pain. It's not possible to be human and to be unaffected by what you see in the third world.