Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

I am only a child. Yet I know that if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this would be.

To deal with these problems - of world population and hunger, of peace, of energy and mineral resources, of environmental pollution, of poverty - we must broaden and deepen our knowledge of nature's laws, and we must broaden and deepen our understanding of the laws of human behavior.

In a few decades, the relationship between the environment, resources and conflict may seem almost as obvious as the connection we see today between human rights, democracy and peace.

A quality education grants us the ability to fight the war on ignorance and poverty.

You cannot achieve environmental security and human development without addressing the basic issues of health and nutrition.

We collaborate with other countries on issues like public health and climate change because we understand these issues affect our collective welfare.

In many parts of the world, especially Pakistan and Afghanistan, terrorism, war and conflict stop children to go to their schools. We are really tired of these wars. Women and children are suffering.

We need to accept the seemingly obvious fact that a toxic environment can make people sick and that no amount of medical intervention can protect us. The health care community must become a powerful political lobby for environmental policy and legislation.

We have no control over the outcome of anything. Like the planet and global warming, we don't control that. If politicians want a war we don't control that. Acts of terrorism, we can't control them.

One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution for that offense is recorded. But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England.

Nearly everywhere there is crushing poverty, religious and ethnic enmity, and exploitation of people, other species, and the earth. Sometimes it may even seem that we have passed the point of no return -- that we cannot limit population, harmonize differences, and decontaminate the planet in time. But in a time of crisis, the only philosophically tenable position for a pessimist is optimism.

It is futile to seek solutions to environmental disturbances without considering them from a broad perspective that encompasses the factors underlying world poverty and the inequities within and among nations.

Peace we want because there is another war to fight against poverty, disease and ignorance.

We all begin to do what we can do, just like we're doing now, to clean up the planet and to find solutions rather than fight. It just happens everywhere.

War and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barriers.

Science and Peace will triumph over Ignorance and War...

All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated.

We have so many issues today that we need to confront. Comprehensive immigration reform. We have to solve the issue of poverty, the issue of hunger, the issue of war - spending billions of dollars to kill rather than to build. We have to deal with the fact that all of our children should be receiving the best possible education.

We need political leadership that will move the world away from war into solving its problems through dialogue and negotiation, to build friendship with people, which is not what we've had with this war on terror.

Today the great gift of God's Creation is exposed to serious dangers and lifestyles which can degrade it. Environmental pollution is making particularly unsustainable the lives of the poor of the world ... we must pledge ourselves to take care of creation and to share its resources in solidarity.

Peace is not just the absence of war. True peace depends upon creating the opportunity that makes life worth living. And to do that, we must confront the common enemies of human beings: nuclear weapons and poverty; ignorance and disease.

If we allow the destruction of the environment, we can see the terrorists have utterly won, and are destroying the future of our children and grandchildren. We must not let that happen.

It's important for people of color to link up with issues around globalization, food security, health, the environment.

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living. Whatever big problem you can imagine, from world peace to the environment to hunger to poverty, the solution always includes education, ... We need to depend more on peer-to-peer and self-driven learning. The laptop is one important means of doing that.

Bhagavad Gita is very relevant to modern times when you see things like global warming, climate chaos, changing weather patterns, natural disasters like hurricane Katrina, extreme poverty, economic disparities, social injustice, war, and terrorism - these are the projection of a collective consciousness that's in disarray.