Tim Hetherington Quotes

Certainly I'll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I've gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.

Not everybody gets to travel halfway around the world to see a whole different perspective. If we can see that on TV, we'll know that society is bigger than the small world we all live in.

The whole world is set up so that for places like Switzerland to exist, that are crime-free and with the best care for everybody, you have to have places like Sudan, or Jamaica. But really, there's enough to share, when you check it. It's not that complicated, really. It's probably less thinking and more feeling that's required.

Well, my view before was a Western view, and I certainly understand marriage equality and civil rights, equal rights for all, but having visited developing nations and some of the poorest nations in the world, I realize how deep it goes and how much work really needs to be done to create equality for all.

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.

I guess I strongly feel that we cannot pretend that the Third World is not part of our world. We cannot say 'OK, there's that problem over there, let's just close our eyes' - we cannot do that.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

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.

When I was 17, I went to India for six weeks and had what, at the time, was a very challenging trip. You walk down the street and you see lepers and beggars, and there were several of us, a group of Americans. I remember we were just trying to park one night somewhere and people were just sleeping in the parking lot.

Moving from Dubai to the Congo was one of the best things that happened to me, it's a shock to be confronted by the contrast in wealth and culture, and it's hard, but I loved it and it influenced me a lot.

India happens to be a rich country inhabited by very poor people.

The greatest difficulty with the world is not its ability to produce, but the unwillingness to share.

You know, the more you can meet people from different walks of life, the better it is for you. I think the more you can create situations and experiences that give you new perspective, the better.

All I know is that every time I go to Africa, I am shaken to my core.

It was very liberating, living in a foreign country, a place where everything was new and strange - the food, the customs, the climate, everything.

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.

My kids miss me when I'm away, but I don't mind living out of a suitcase. The U.K., U.S., France, Germany, Iraq... it's such a thrill meeting people of different cultures, learning about and from them. It's changed my perception about life, humanity and spirituality.

I remember being in China and realising how irrelevant not even Britain is, but also Europe. We're just another remote country that hardly impinges on some places at all.

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

You can't not be changed by the experience of seeing extreme poverty. You start to want to think about ways in which you can make the world better.

We live in such a sheltered environment in the United States. I've been fortunate enough to have traveled all over the world, and I've seen things you only read about and see on the news.

In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest.

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

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.