Tariq Ramadan Quotes

I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.

The economists are blind leaders of the blind; they know what is, they do not know what ought to be. They know how the present economic machinery works, they cannot give the drawings for a better machine. That will come from forces outside of professional economics — quite outside of it.

I don't believe we need to choose between addressing economic issues and addressing issues of social or racial justice.

I am going to attack income inequality and I think I have a pretty good plan to do so. I don't just tell you what I'm against. I tell you what I'm for and how I would do it.

For the first time in human history, society has the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty

We've got a lot of work to do economically in this country to bring about a more just and fair economy.

In the United States today we have the most unequal wealth and income distribution of any major country on earth - worse than at any time since the 1920s. This is an economy that must be changed in fundamental ways.

For the first time in our history it is possible to conquer poverty.

We can remove poverty from the surface of the earth only if we can redesign our institutions - like the banking institutions, and other institutions; if we redesign our policies, if we look back on our concepts, so that we have a different idea of poor people.

Living through the 1929 Great Depression helped shape my social conscience. During this time, I realized the earth was still the same place, manufacturing plants were still intact, and resources were still there, but people didn’t have money to buy the products. I felt the rules of the game we play by were outmoded and damaging. This began a life-long quest resulting in the conclusions and designs presented in The Venus Project.

How long do we have to deal with conservative failure? How long? Thirty years is not enough? So I would say enough with that, and I would say check out the Center for American Progress, and the writings by Patrick Garofalo, economic guru. That's what I would say.

The fight against poverty and hunger must be fought constantly and on many fronts, especially in its causes.

For a hundred years we have been one of the largest oil-producing countries in the world but with a 60 percent poverty rate and now we are canceling the historical debt.

In a world of massive wealth and income inequality, Europe must support Greece’s efforts to build an economy which creates more jobs and income, not more unemployment and suffering.

I think that we must face the fact that in reality, you cannot have economic and political equality without having some form of social equality. I think this is inevitable.

I think people are very focused on the economic issues. They want an economy that works for everybody.

We are in the middle of a world revolution, and I don't mean Communism. The revolution I'm talking about is that of the little, poor people all over the world. They're beginning to learn what there is in life, and to learn what they are missing.

What [Bernie] Sanders has done is he's focused the nation on the fact that these things are not inevitable. They are the result of policies. We can do better to create an economy that works well for working Americans.

I get up every morning and think...today I'm going to end capitalism.

Once we link up and network, there will be new institutions, new beginnings, and a change in the economy because capitalism is destroying many people's lives. It's just one leap to think in a different way.

It is more difficult to fight poverty in a rich country than in a poor one.

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

As the economy gets better, everything else gets worse.

I think the critical point, really, is that we need to focus black economic empowerment more on the creation of new wealth rather than on these big deals that have been characteristic of this process in the past, of people going to banks, borrowing a lot of money, buying this and when the shares don't perform very well, the shares go back to the banks, because there's other people who own this anyway. I think we need to re-focus it so that it really does impact on growth, new investment, new employment and a general, better spread of wealth in South Africa.

I believe capitalism is dying a slow death right now, as you can see with the recession and with the credit crunch and with social and economic dismay the world as whole and the pandemic of promiscuity, drugs, alcohol and all the other diseases. That's the worst and I believe it's time for a change.