Diane von Furstenberg Quotes

India, China, and Latin America have a tremendous stake in the people's century. As their masses learn to read and write, and as they become productive mechanics, their standard of living will double and treble.

In the rich countries the poor expect a quantity and quality of commodities beyond the dreams of Louis XIV, while many of the so-called developing countries enjoy much higher economic growth rates than those of industrialized countries at a similar stage of their own histories.

Modernization is found in markets.

China is developing very quickly. At every stage, its needs are different.

Until the Nineteen-Eighties, when Deng Xiaoping designated the area as China's first special economic zone, Shenzhen had been a tiny fishing village. Suddenly, eleven million people appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; factories sprang up, often housed in hastily constructed tower blocks.

The explosive growth in places like Shanghai has helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into a thriving new middle class. What China has done is nothing short of an economic transformation, and the citizens of this country have every right to be proud.

China and India will, separately and together, unleash an explosion of demand.

The typical big Japanese company has somewhere between a third and 40 percent of its revenues coming from developing countries, and about a third of Japan's exports are also to the emerging countries, so in a strange way, Japan, which has very little internal growth, its big companies are a good way to play the emerging markets.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

When I was a student there in the mid-1990s, they had just created the weekend; depth and individuality were slowly returning after the austere, colorless low of the 1970s. When I returned to live in China from 2005 to 2013, the country was building everything anew.

The electronics industry expanded rapidly and the seeds for the semiconductor and software revolution were planted. The postwar period also saw the suburbanization of America, the rise of the homeowner, the build-out of the interstate highway system, and the rise of automobile culture. Credit availability expanded dramatically.

Whether or not the standard of living made possible by mass production and in turn by mass circulation, is supported by and filled with the work of us hucksters, I guess is something that only history can decide.

The dramatic modernization of the Asian economies ranks alongside the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution as one of the most important developments in economic history.

20 centuries of progress have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account and a high opinion of himself but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment.

We have built cities, developed industry and cultivated agriculture - we have transformed the State of Israel into an example and symbol for many other countries in the world.

I am pleased for Poland as a country, that new motorways are being constructed, new businesses, new stadiums.

The capitalist system has lifted mankind out of mass poverty. It is this system that in the last century, in the last generation, even in the last decade, has acceleratively been changing the face of the world, and has provided the masses of mankind with amenities that even kings did not possess or imagine a few generations ago.

Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books.

The production of goods had become an end in itself and the consumption of goods only the means to further production.

Since the war [WWII], the world has been rushing forward at an unprecedented and exhilarating speed … Yet Britain lags behind, lacking the will or the plan which can bring this future within the reach of us all.

None of today’s leading indicators existed a century ago. They were invented to measure the economies of the industrial nation-states of the mid-20th Century… The 21st Century, however, is proving more difficult to measure.

Up to now, economic development has always meant that people, instead of doing something, are enabled to buy it... Economic development has also meant that, after a time, people must buy the commodity because the conditions under which they could get along without it had disappeared from their physical, social, or cultural environment.

Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.

Seoul and Shanghai, Jaipur and Jakarta; shining skyscrapers, pricey hotels, traffic-jammed streets ablaze with neon - all were built atop a foundation of laboratory-bred rice.

Prime Minister Singh is to be commended for beginning the process of transforming India into a global economic power by initiating economic liberalization in the early 1990s.