Emma Thompson 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.

An experience that shaped me happened early in my TV career when I filmed in Mozambique, Angola and Bangladesh for 'Blue Peter' and Comic Relief. Places with extreme poverty. When you see that first-hand as a young person, you take it with you for life.

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.

We think we have a responsibility. And I think it's important for all of us in the Western world to realize that we've all been blessed a lot and if you go to these parts they don't have a lot, even before the tsunami.

I love traveling. It not only opens my mind up, but it also allows me to use my fame in another way through humanitarian works and stuff, and being an influence around the world.

When people said Africa would change me, I didn't understand what they meant. To see the poverty in the townships, for instance, is overwhelming. I found it heart-wrenching to see young children walking barefoot and hungry in the dirt. I'm the kind of person who wants to change the world right here and now, so I got frustrated.

I like stories that have a social impact and social attributes to them. That's the whole reason we make films: to broaden our limited view of things and to see how life is evolving elsewhere.

I've always felt that I'm affected by the world, by the way we treat each other, by the way different countries treat each other.

I used to work for the World Health Organisation in poor countries all over the world - Bangladesh, Korea, the Philippines and India. You learn a whole range of things about how other people are living and try to connect with them to gain an understanding of where they're coming from.

I utterly reject the view that the Third World is doomed to poverty and starvation. Not only is this wrong, I think this attitude verges on the immoral, like thinking that slavery is an unalterable facet of the human condition so why bother doing anything about it?

I am astonished each time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America or about the world. It's quite blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S.

In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.

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.

I wish I had known when I was in the White House what I know now about the Third World.

I love experiencing other people's realities, seeing the world through their eyes for a short period of time.

Going to Liberia really changed a lot for me. I didn't realize what was happening on the same planet. My understanding that in the world everything is interconnected really grew - to go to one of the poorest countries from one of the richest countries in the world. It was two worlds apart.

When you see in places like Africa and parts of Asia abject poverty, hungry children and malnutrition around you, and you look at yourself as being people who have well being and comforts, I think it takes a very insensitive, tough person not to feel they need to do something.

Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.

And there are so many people in the third world suffering so horribly right now, and we are so focused on ourselves and our culture that a lot of things are showing up in our culture that are making it impossible for us to focus on others. We're so self-focused.

We live in a globalising world. That means that all of us, consciously or not, depend on each other. Whatever we do or refrain from doing affects the lives of people who live in places we'll never visit.

When you see people suffering and dying and hungry, this job gives you the ability to do something about it.

Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries

I talk about my dad and the American dream, and I just want to say to Americans how fascinated we are by America. We would love Americans to look at the rest of the world that way sometimes.

In terms of helping people understand and know each other a little better, music is universal - universal and transporting.

I started traveling out of curiosity, but I have come to believe in travel's political importance, that encouraging a nation's citizenry to travel may be as important as encouraging school attendance, environmental conservation, or national thrift. You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered.