Rajiv Gandhi Quotes

I'm pleased that some economists and sociologists are beginning to talk about, for example, alternative measures of human well-being - alternative, that is, to GDP, on which the world runs.

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

The fundamental purpose of … productivity must not be the mere multiplication of products. It must not be profit or domination. Rather, it must be the service of the human person

Growth is not an objective in itself; we should be concerned with standards of living.

Development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies.

Economic growth and human development need to go hand in hand. Human values need to be advocated vigorously.

I believe it is within our capacity that by the year 2051 that 51 percent of the human population will be flourishing. That is my charge.

All over the world, we're seeing access to food, clean water, education and healthcare improve; as a result, global innovation is rising as well.

The well-being of the nation is in the well-being of the people.

When people are thriving, the city is thriving.

Beyond advocating for greater access to consumer markets abroad, we need to go one step further and advocate for a higher quality of life for the people who are the driving force behind them.

This present system by which industry is motivated exclusively by the quest for maximal profits - though it may have helped a great deal to develop, to industrialize our country so rapidly and so successfully - now it's clearly passed its usefulness. It is keeping us from achieving the ideal society that we should have. We say industry must produce to improve the quality of life for all our people.

Good roads, good houses, adequate electricity, good schools or good hospitals in the village are indeed, the parameters of progress. However, in my view, 100 percent literate village is the true symbol of real progress.

The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.

Human development, as an approach, is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it.

As the twentieth century draws to a close it has become obvious that material yardsticks alone cannot serve as an adequate measure of human well-being. Even as basic an issue as poverty has to be re-examined to take into account the psychological sense of deprivation that makes people feel poor.

With an estimated population of nine billion people by 2050, we cannot continue to consume resources at the same rate and maintain our quality of life.

Real progress cannot be measured by money alone. We must ensure that economic growth contributes to our quality of life, rather than degrading it

We had to build a city not for businesses or automobiles, but for children and thus for people. Instead of building highways, we restricted car use. We invested in high-quality sidewalks, pedestrian streets, parks, bicycle paths, libraries; we got rid of thousands of cluttering commercial signs and planted trees. All our everyday efforts have one objective: Happiness.

Let us hopethat by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

People are the common denominator of progress. So no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills,and the other familiar furniture of economic development. But we are coming to realize that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.

Development must be such that it positively transforms the lives of the common people.

One of the great misconceptions about spiritual growth that develops in a lot of churches is that information alone is adequate to produce transformed human beings. So if we want to have a church of spiritually mature people, let's just keep cramming more and more information into them... Information alone is not adequate for the transformation of the human personality.

We must together build an economic agenda for the India of our dreams that translates into improved standards of living, increased human well-being and assured social justice.

The measure of progress of civilization is the progress of the people.