John M. Ferren Quotes

It is conflict overall that mires people in poverty. That is the first law of development.

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.

Africa is not for the weak-hearted: infrastructure issues are there. The middle class is absent in most of the countries. We have to cater to the low end of the market to grow.

There is despair, Mr President, in the faces of those you do not see; in the places that you do not visit.

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 and lack of education are ruining our planet.

When you live in the Philippines or a country like that, you develop something of a very thick skin because you're confronted every day with all of the problems all around you.

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.

It was a slow understanding that the lack of education in a country like Somalia creates these huge social problems.

We go from summit to summit, and our people go from abyss to abyss … the drama of terrible underdevelopment.

Baltimore is a goddamn ghetto. It's worse than Washington. It is shit.

The greatest problem we [in Kenya] face is the growing number of people living in poverty. The related sense of hopelessness has to be impacting on every part of environmental management.

When you socially neglect a people, when you economically abandon a people, when you transfer wealth from them to the well-to-do, what are a people going to do? They're going to respond with very sad forms of despair, and that's true for everybody - I don't care what color you are.

In the 55-60 years of their rule, the successive Congress government have only looted the country and plunged it into poverty, casteism, regionalism, terrorism, and naxalism.

Stark inequality, poverty, and unemployment are driving increased social unrest and, consequently, social and economic risk. Environmental deterioration may well intensify social inequality.

There are good things about Indonesia, but there are bad things about it that I hope can be fixed.

When we look at a conflict, it is so often rooted in injustice, prejudice, competition for resources, poverty, poor governance and corruption.

Watching the scenes out of New Orleans, if you turn down the sound it could be the Sudan or any Third World country. But it's not. it's the United States of America.

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.

You don't grow up naive in Africa.

I think the collision between the First and Third world is going to become more and more conspicuous. It's the big cliff that we've all got to climb.

Understandably, no peace can sustained when people continue to suffer from hunger, lack of jobs, lack of basic public services - and most of all - lack of opportunity or hope.

Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.

In Latin America, you don't do things for the money because there is no money.

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