Guy Ryder Quotes

We still have a soft approach on the perpetrators of crimes like worst forms of child labour.

We learned that kicking down doors to free children from carpet factories isn't enough to stop child labour - we had to tackle the underlying poverty in which their families lived, through education.

India does not encourage - India has forbidden - child labour. We are a rule-based and rule-governed country.

It's estimated that there may be two hundred and fifty million children in the world engaged in some form of exploitative child labour.

More than 30 years ago, when I had embarked upon the fight against child labour, it was not even considered an issue worth any discussion. It was accepted as a way of life in India, much like it was in other countries. Today, no country or business or society can throw this issue away.

We must ensure that while eliminating child labor in the export industry, we are also eliminating their labour from the informal sector, which is more invisible to public scrutiny - and thus leaves the children more open to abuse and exploitation.

The new millennium began with a great global dream. World leaders gathered at the United Nations in 2000 and adopted, among others, a historic goal to reduce poverty by half by 2015. Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world in one voice, one that specified time and size.

I have been very strongly advocating that poverty must not be used as an excuse to continue child labour. It perpetuates poverty. If children are deprived of education, they remain poor.

If we can't begin to agree on fundamentals, such as the elimination of the most abusive forms of child labor, then we really are not ready to march forward into the future.

In the 19th century, a lot of people were against outlawing child labour, because to do so would be against the very foundations of a free market economy: 'These children want to work, these people want to employ them... what is your problem? It's not as if anyone has kidnapped them...'

We as the governments, workers, employers and civil society must declare a war on child labour. This war cannot be won without strong, committed, coherent, and well-resourced worldwide movement. Equally needed is a genuine and active coordination between intergovernmental agencies at the highest level.

You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.

In my first book, 'A Return to Love', I wrote about things in the outer world that need to change - how we need to ameliorate deep poverty, heal the earth, end war.

When it comes to gang-based child exploitation, it is self-evident to anyone who cares to look that if you look at all the recent high-profile cases, there is a high proportion of men that are of Pakistani heritage.

If we fix our economic system and invest in the human capital of the poor, then we should welcome every new person born as a source of betterment for our world and all of us on it.

I was deeply concerned then, and have become more concerned since, that unless we can deal with the questions of development and the questions of poverty, there's no way that we're going to have a peaceful world for our children.

No child should be born to work at the cost of his childhood and freedom..

In the developing countries the United Nations doesn't mean frustration, confrontation or condemnation. It means environmental sanitation, agricultural production, telecommunications, the fight against illiteracy, the great struggle against poverty ignorance and disease.

The exploitation of children is both easy and profitable.

And the children? Twelve hours of work for children! 0, misery. But not all the Jules Simon of the Academy of Moral and Political Science, not all the Germanys of Jesuitism, could have invented a vice more degrading to the intelligence of the children, more corrupting of their instincts, more destructive of their organism than work in the vitiated atmosphere of the capitalist factory

Our present joyless labour, and our lives scared and anxious as the life of a hunted beast, are forced upon us by the present system of producing for the profit of the privileged classes.

Some people say that we will never fix education in America until we fix poverty. I think that they have it exactly wrong. We will never fix poverty until we fix education.

China is a developing country and we regard subsistence as the fundamental human right.

What does peace mean in a world in which the combined wealth of the world's 587 billionaires exceeds the combined gross domestic product of the world's 135 poorest countries?

We used to wage war on poverty—not poor people.