Henry R. Breck Quotes

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.

What does peace mean in a world in which the combined wealth of the world's 587 billionaires exceeds the combined gross domestic product of the world's 135 poorest countries?

We have got some mountains to move. Three billion people - half of God's children - are living on less than $2 a day.

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.

We are living in the 21st century, and children are dying of hunger, so how do we fight it?

Big meetings and big talk are not enough in a world that is hungry for change. Big action - world leaders keeping their promises, and developing countries committing resources while listening ardently to the voice of the small farmer - is needed to bring big results and prosperity to the world's poor.

If you look internationally over the last 50 years there have been improvements in the third world, but in the last 20 years the reverse has happened, with debt crises and increased poverty.

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.

So it's mainly a question of helping the Third World overcome the effects of global warming.

The West has become the world model; developing countries are dreaming of living like us, which is impossible. They should reject our model, because it is not sustainable. Developing countries should even give us the example, but unfortunately that's not what happens.

We face a dilemma because although everybody is better off than they've ever been at any time in our history, we've also got the biggest gap between the rich and the poor that we've ever had, and we've potentially got a planet which is going to go bust any day.

I was deeply concerned then, and have become more concerned since, that unless we can deal with the questions of development and the questions of poverty, there's no way that we're going to have a peaceful world for our children.

Half the people of the world are living on less than $2 a day.

The impoverishment of any single people in the world means danger to the well-being of all other peoples.

The biggest drag on global growth in the coming decade will be climate change and the failure to adequately deal with the consequences of poverty.

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.

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.

I lived with a coffee farmer called Dukale on a trip I made with World Vision to Ethiopia, and realised there's no good reason for the disparity in opportunity around the world.

I feel great identification with the developing world.

The 'Third World' is a term I don't like very much because we're all one world. I want people to know that the largest part of humanity is suffering.

We will never end poverty if we don't tackle climate change.

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.

On a macro level, four billion people on Earth make less than four dollars a day.

We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that's what's happening. Too many people there. They can't support themselves - and it's not an inhuman thing to say. It's the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it's going to get worse and worse.