Bob Geldof Quotes

The Secretary General has endorsed a propaganda exercise for international finance institutions whose policies are widely held to be at the root of many of the most grave social problems facing the poor all over the world.

I've always stood on one fact - that all over the world, there are only two things, the Establishment and the poor people. The poor people are a massive majority and across the world they are exploited in different kinds of ways. The Establishment depends on exploiting raw materials and the poor.

The world is not quite as inter-dependent as advertised. What happens in the poorest, most marginalized, and most dysfunctional places in the developing world only rarely comes back to bite those living in the wealthy world. What happens in failed states often stays in failed states.

In the past, we spoke of poverty, misery only in the south. Now there is a lot of misery, a lot of bad that creates victims in the north as well. This has become manifest: the global system was not made to serve the good of all, but to serve multinational companies.

If you look internationally over the last 50 years there have been improvements in the third world, but in the last 20 years the reverse has happened, with debt crises and increased poverty.

I'm concerned about - the oppression of the poor.

World wide capitalism kills more people everyday then Hitler did. And he was crazy.

No one can say how long the process of human extinction might take, but as it proceeds, the same global order will prevail that always prevails: rich nations will find ways to protect themselves and make themselves comfortable, while the poor nations and the poor people of the planet will suffer.

The American Dream, coupled with government subsidies of utilities and cheap consumer goods courtesy of slave labour somewhere else, has kept the poor huddled masses from rising up.

The planet is not yet safe. It suffers from the kind of greed that ignores not only global warming but an even more immediate bomb ready to detonate—the terrible gap on the globe between the rich and the poor, the technologically proficient and the majority left behind, the overfed and the starving, and the arrogance of our only superpower, my country, that sees only as far as the next election or tomorrow's Dow Jones Industrial Index.

The problem with the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund] is that they have no constituency in the United States.

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?

[Developing country] sweatshops, where the conditions are admittedly appalling by Western standards, represent an improvement -- often a significant improvement -- over the alternatives available to their workers. To boycott them or impose other significant additional costs on them makes life worse for many poor people by depriving them of relatively good jobs. This is especially true for women in the developing world, for whom rural life is often far worse than industrial labor in cities.

All countries have poor people. Yet it's a very rare country which understands the indignities of poverty, while education systems maintain the status quo. The children of the elite go to the best schools and get the best jobs, not because they are the best. We're not taking advantage of the intellectual power on this planet.

The worst enemy of humanity is U.S. capitalism. That is what provokes uprisings like our own, a rebellion against a system, against a neoliberal model, which is the representation of a savage capitalism. If the entire world doesn't acknowledge this reality, that the national states are not providing even minimally for health, education and nourishment, then each day the most fundamental human rights are being violated.

Everybody in politics claims to want to get everybody out of poverty. What's the opposite? Wealth. And what is often criticized by the left? Wealth.

If we use goods made from raw materials that are obtained from a poor country without the proceeds being used to benefit the people of that country, we become complicit in a particularly iniquitous form of grand larceny.

Food prices are often kept artificially high. The result is that the Millennium Development Goals set out by the United Nations at the start of the new millennium are not being reached. Fine words have not yet been turned into deeds.

I lived with a coffee farmer called Dukale on a trip I made with World Vision to Ethiopia, and realised there's no good reason for the disparity in opportunity around the world.

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

We live increasingly in a world of haves and have-nots, of gated communities next to ghettos, of extreme poverty and unbelievable riches. Some enjoy rights that are completely denied to others. Relative inequalities are exploding, and the world's poorest, despite all the advances of globalisation, may even be getting poorer.

What I worry about is the lack of understanding in society around the world that there is a divide in the world between those who have and those who do not.

We are the nation the most powerful, the most armed and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world.

By seeing the problem of poverty merely in terms of assistance, we overlook that our enormous economic advantage is deeply tainted by how it accumulated over the course of one historical process that has devastated the societies and cultures of four continents.

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.