Jeremy Rifkin Quotes

Rich countries can afford to overpay for things.

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.

In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease.

90 percent of my time is spent on 10 percent of the world.

We had better look out for ourselves and make the rest of the world look out for themselves. If we tried to feed the world, we will starve and perhaps destroy America…

The developing world is poor. It needs capital.

Distribution of the wealth of the world is something for which no one sees a practical solution

If everyone wants to eat like people in Bangladesh, then we would have food coming out of everybody's ears.

On the one hand, there has been a remarkable expansion of the total production and productivity of food production, and on the other hand an extraordinarily skewed distribution system, substituting medium-run threats for short-term threats for the majority of the world's population, particularly the 50 to 80 percent at the bottom.

Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby those fruits may be eaten.

It occurred to me that there wouldn't be world hunger, if you people would MOVE WHERE THE FOOD IS!!!

The middle class in the rich countries is where the political game is being played. They are voting in elections in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany. They are working people in the upper part of the global income distribution. They might on average be happy that the Chinese are doing well, but they are not happy that the Chinese are doing well relative to them.

The gap between the rich and the poor is the most dangerous threat to world peace we have.

You have the mainstream bourgeois life of the U.S., Europe, the "developed" world - the life of technology, education, mortgages, careers, a certain level of physical comfort - while on the other hand, several billion people on the planet exist on less than a dollar a day. That's a huge and terrible reality to get your head around.

It is staggering that in the 21st century, half of the world's population - that's three and a half billion people - own no more than a tiny elite whose numbers could all fit comfortably on a double-decker bus.

I've had the luxury of travel and, in the luxury of travel, I've seen the detriments of poverty and I've gone on to see how easy the cures can be - cures that cost cents to the richest nations in the world.

I think there should be an Occupy Gallifrey. Because 0.000001% of the people have 99.99999% of the Time.

Global inequality is such an abstract concept, simply because there is no global government. Telling people in rich countries who have had no increase in real incomes, stagnant median wages and so on, that on the other hand global inequality is going down because people who are much poorer than them are getting richer - it's something that maybe they would like in an abstract sense, because everyone is happy there are fewer poor Chinese, but you may not be as happy if these Chinese are taking your job.

Those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.

The world's fat is badly divided.

We are 6.6 billion people now. We can only feed 4 billion. I don't see 2 billion volunteers to disappear.

Consumerism has led us to become used to an excess and daily waste of food, to which, at times, we are no longer able to give a just value, which goes well beyond mere economic parameters. We should all remember, however, that throwing food away is like stealing from the tables of the the poor, the hungry!

Nobody should be hitting lotto for 36 million dollars when we got people starving in the streets. That is not idealistic, that's just real. That is just stupid. There's no way Michael Jackson, or whoever should have thousands, millions, billions of dollars and we got people broke with two-three jobs and still can't pay bills on time. There's no way! No way these people should have planes when people don't have houses, apartments, shacks, drawers, pants!!!

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.