Ban Ki-moon Quotes

The trends that are shaping the twenty-first-century world embody both promise and peril. Globalization, for example, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while contributing to social fragmentation and a massive increase in inequality, not to mention serious environmental damage.

China is a country, still, of great contrast. While hundreds of millions of people are part of the middle class and yearn for things made in America - American brands, movies, music - there are other hundreds of millions of people throughout China who are living on the equivalent of one U.S. dollar a day.

One can't help but be a bit melancholy when you see how the world has changed, and I don't mean that nostalgically.

The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.

Globalisation has made us more vulnerable. It creates a world without borders, and makes us painfully aware of the limitations of our present instruments, and of politics, to meet its challenges.

We've moved from a small world on a big planet to a big world on a small planet.

I think there is some kind of disillusionment in the West about the gains of modernity and of economic growth and it takes a form of skepticism about the gains of prosperity generally.

Social media has changed the world forever. We're not going to go backwards. People are not going to accept being poor, accept being excluded anymore.

Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing... you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn't affect two-thirds of the people of the world.

I think the implications for the rise of China are huge in terms of the political landscape, economic balance, de-velopment thinking, and the environment.

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.

Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support.

India's prosperity is sectioned by geography, such as in Bangalore, where the information technology industry is prominent. Because they have a conduit out of India, competing in the world by the Internet, it's not regulated in corrupt ways, and it is very prosperous.

Globalization is not a monolithic force but an evolving set of consequences - some good, some bad and some unintended. It is the new reality.

Globalisation will make our societies more creative and prosperous, but also more vulnerable.

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

India has in fact raced ahead, in ways that are more dazzling and more confusing than America is.

What is the world coming to?

Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years?

I'm fascinated by how ethnic communities have assimilated into massive capitalist environments.

What people recognize is that there's a fear that the United States is in an unstoppable decline. They see the rise of China, the rise of India, the rise of the Soviet Union and our loss militarily going forward.

In America, you complain about job losses because of China, but here, we carry all of the environmental costs.

The world is a tougher place to live in than it was back then, as we come into the computer age.

Over the past thirty years Europe’s influence has transformed Cairo. Now…we are civilized.

The remote area today is more proximate to economic potential. A fiber-optic cable can go where no road or rail ever has.