Hans Rosling Quotes

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.

One of the issues facing us today is that there are countries where there is a serious lack of resources, the standards of living are very low, and this creates a fundamental unease and discomfort in entire populations.

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

I'd worked at the World Bank briefly as an undergrad and studied poverty levels around the world - particularly those earning less than $1.25 a day.

Haiti is in desperate poverty.

We have three billion people, half the world's population today, living on less than two dollars a day.

Half of the world lives on [about] $2 a day. If there is a hungry kid in the world, we shouldn't consider ourselves more evolved than homo habilis.

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

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.

Sub-Saharan Africa is also home to 400 million of the world's poorest people.

Ladies and gentlemen, I take office at a time in which the world is living in extreme contradictions.

Presidents and prime ministers, whether they live in the rich or the poor world, are insulated and isolated from the devastating impact of global poverty. They read the statistics, but they rarely witness at first hand the misery and degradation of life on a dollar a day.

We think of violence as being conflict and fighting and wars and so forth, but the most ongoing horrific measure of violence is in the horrible poverty of the Third World... and the poverty in the United States as well.

The poor peasant here hives under conditions quite different from those of Russia. Though often terrible, they are not as appalling as they were there.

We would be driving down the street in a place like Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and started to see, my gosh, the only people that have shoes are men. Why does that woman have a baby in her belly and one on her back, and she's carrying a huge load of bananas? You start to ask these questions.

I don't think that people in America are really given enough information about the Third World.

By the time this concert ends this evening, 30,000 Africans will have died because of extreme poverty. By this time tomorrow evening, another 30,000. This does not make sense.

In India there are more poor people in three states... than there are in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.

Rural communities in Africa, South Asia and Latin America are where the majority of hungry people are and the inequality that exists between women and men in these communities is holding back progress. These women have a very tough time, so much is expected of them.

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 problems of the Third World—its poverty, its ignorance, its debt—never really seemed to affect Europeans and Americans. No longer. It's a little warmer than it used to be. The water is rising.

Third world kids are dying today to pay off the debt.

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

The world is not quite as inter-dependent as advertised. What happens in the poorest, most marginalized, and most dysfunctional places in the developing world only rarely comes back to bite those living in the wealthy world. What happens in failed states often stays in failed states.

Appalachia, my state, eastern Kentucky, has a large amount of poverty.