Henry A. Wallace 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.

Thomas Friedman's 'The World is Flat' sold more copies in India than in the U.K. The market for go-getting business books or wonkish tomes by corporate moguls posing as philosopher kings has grown dramatically in modernising China and India.

When our thousands of Chinese students abroad return home, you will see how China will transform itself.

Japan is a well-educated, technological society. It is a free society, protects intellectual property.

The world is getting more connected through technology and travel. Cuisines are evolving. Some people are scared of globalization, but I think people will always take pride in cultural heritage.

The civilized world is far ahead of us. We have no choice but to catch up.

I'm not happy exporting jobs but we must move ahead in technology and patents. I don't like losing any jobs but we'll see new opportunities created selling products there. We'll have a net increase in economic activity, just as we did with free trade. It's tempting to want to protect our markets and stay closed. But at some point it all comes crashing down and you're hopelessly left behind. Then you are Russia.

Civic rationality and modern capitalism triumphed in the medieval northern European cities – but not in Chinese, Indian or Muslim cities

The Chinese and the Americans are great peoples. The Americans are optimistic, full of enterprising drive, down to earth, and innovative. In just over 200 years, they have turned the United States into the most developed country in the world, and made phenomenal achievements in economic development and science and technology.

Technical knowledge has now become an integral aspect of the Iranian psyche.

Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West.

Today's China is not in the least shut out from the rest of the world. Trends come to us from all over the world. And the Internet is really developed in China. We get news from all over the world.

Education, particularly higher education, will take Africa into the mainstream of globalization.

The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them.

I was in Bangalore, India, the Silicon Valley of India, when I realized that the world was flat.

History is full of examples of poorer nations that become wealthy by exploiting their comparative advantage in cheap labor to become globally competitive in a range of manufacturing industries.... If robots are expected to take over many of the menial jobs currently performed by people, the concern should not be for the working class in wealthy countries but for the billions living in the developing world who will now have lost the only established ladder out of poverty.

Can one name a single nation that has not turned to the West in its quest for civilization?

Driven by globalization and technology our country and our economy is becoming different every day.

They [Western Nations] enjoy freedom, prosperity, and peace. They live happily year after year. Their national life is millennial. Commerce, developed; military strong; industry and technology grew progressively. Political situation and scholarship are perfect. I am resentful that my country is by far more miserable than the Western nations. I am regretful that China, who had enjoyed a glorious past, has now become desperate. The nature of my people was originally not bad. Why could not they achieve higher accomplishments than the white people?

[Reporting on America:] It's progressive growth ... before the century has elapsed will have changed the ... colonial system of the universe and the relative position of all civilized society.

A completely industrialized society is of no consequence to me.

The only things that matter in the world are Japan and China, Russia and Europe. Latin America doesn’t matter…. And … there’s nothing you can do about the Middle East.

National cultures and heritages must compete for man's attention with the mind-absorbing advances of universal science.

You only have to ask yourself, "What would happen if the entire population of India and China had two-car garages and were living at the technological and the economic standard that the American middle class is today?" The planet would become very rapidly uninhabitable.

… in an age of accelerating change, when even the most sophisticated skills are quickly outdated, we will find many allies in the developing world who are coming to understand that the most important skill anyone can learn is the ability to go on learning.