Ralph Merkle Quotes

There is still a severe and scary amount of extreme poverty in rural parts of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma and sub-Saharan Africa.

Desperation is a fact of life in many poor, overcrowded countries.

Our time has experienced greater technological progress than ever existed before, and yet we are faced with the fact that world-wide poverty, hunger, death of children, unemployment, misery and the destruction of nature have not abated but rather to some extent increased. Many peoples are threatened with economic ruin, social disarray, political marginalization and national collapse.

Upon the state falls directly the ... burden of the demoralization of its citizenry and of the social unrest which attend destitution and the denial of opportunity.

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

Whatever people's backgrounds or values, a society where more and more people face a daily struggle to house, clothe and even feed themselves and their families cannot possibly be the answer.

Vast areas are witness to the struggles of destitute populations trying to survive under unlivable conditions.

Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.

The problem of the Middle East is poverty more than politics.

The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace.

Niger is not an isolated island of desperation. It lies within a sea of problems across Africa - particularly the 'forgotten emergencies' in poor countries or regions with little strategic or material appeal.

Poverty and lack of education are ruining our planet.

Haiti is in desperate poverty.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, 'What are we going to do?' but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that's nothing.

The idea that because you're born in Haiti you could die having a child. The idea that because you're born in you know Malawi your children may go to bed hungry. We want to take some of the chance out of that.

What must a poor nation do when its very sustenance depends on the remains and bits that the nations gracefully throw them, once they have had their fill…. Our planet is rich enough to provide for all of us, so why this tragic war for life which has been clouding our lives for generations?

The planet is not yet safe. It suffers from the kind of greed that ignores not only global warming but an even more immediate bomb ready to detonate—the terrible gap on the globe between the rich and the poor, the technologically proficient and the majority left behind, the overfed and the starving, and the arrogance of our only superpower, my country, that sees only as far as the next election or tomorrow's Dow Jones Industrial Index.

This is a third world environment.

For every talent that poverty has stimulated, it has blighted a hundred.

On my way back to Missouri I stopped in St Louis and I saw my first bread line – 200 starving men forming a gray line as they waited for food. The sight of them disturbed me.

The misery of the people here is very great, the beggars innumerable and increasing everyday…One half of the people in Ireland eat neither bread nor flesh for one half of the year, nor wear Shoes or Stockings; your Hogs in England and Essex Calves lie and live better than they.

We live on a planet of limited resources - an abstract notion for some of the world's population, but for many of the poorest and most vulnerable, those limits are all too real.

Poverty is everywhere, but in Africa, there is more.

I was not so lucky to grow up with toys as I grew up in a remote area of Kenya.

It's extremely depressing that a country of this magnitude, and where it thinks it lies in itself, can allow so many foodbanks to be operating in this country.