Bill Drayton 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.

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.

You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.

These days there is a lot of poverty in the world, and that's a scandal when we have so many riches and resources to give to everyone. We all have to think about how we can become a little poorer.

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

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.

Today continuing poverty and distress are a deeper and more important cause of international tensions, of the conditions that can produce war, than previously.

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.

One half of the world's people live on less than two dollars a day. This should concern our national security policy as well as our conscience.

In the last era of the [civil rights] movement, the disenfranchised were the blacks, the colored. Now the disenfranchised are the have-nots, the unemployed, the hungry.

Income inequality is the central problem all the way across the world.

I agree that income disparity is the great issue of our time. It is even broader and more difficult than the civil rights issues of the 1960s. The '99 percent' is not just a slogan. The disparity in income has left the middle class with lowered, not rising, income, and the poor unable to reach the middle class.

When I see the discrepancy between kids in the Philippines and the U.S., I feel like I have to give them an opportunity.

We forgot that Martin Luther King, Jr. changed his discourse toward the end of his life because he understood that the real fundamental problem of this country was not just race, it was class. It was the economical situation of not only poor blacks but also the poor white part of the population and everything in between.

What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?

We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.

It is our experience that the nation doesn't move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.

Poverty calls us to sow hope.... Poverty is the flesh of the poor Jesus, in that child who is hungry, in the one who is sick, in those unjust social structures.

Those who know the normal life of the poor... will realize well enough that without economic security, liberty is not worth having.

Poverty is the openmouthed relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough.

People in the big rich countries are often extremely dismissive of the small countries. They think nothing that happens there is of any interest or that it matters at all, but, at the very least, with that attitude they miss out on some extraordinary stories.

It is a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans.

We cannot exist as a little island of well-being in a world where two-thirds of the people go to bed hungry every night.