Hans Kung Quotes

Poverty is not inevitable. It is a human ill that we can fight if we decide to do so together.

Economic development and poverty alleviation are so complicated that I don't think there's a single background or a single discipline that is sufficient to tackle these great human problems.

In the old days the problems of government were few and political, now they are many and are economic and sociological ...

Trade, in and of itself, is not going to solve all the world’s evils.

For if enough people were really convinced that growth should be halted, and if they acted on that conviction, then billions of others might be deprived of any realistic hope of gaining the opportunities now enjoyed by the more fortunate.

This Constitution does not reflect the thoughts, hopes and aspirations of ordinary people. It does nothing for jobs or economic growth and widens further still the democratic deficit.

Have you heard a single national figure tell you all of the crises of the recent past are not economic, they're cultural?

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

It's true that it's within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good, although it's not going to solve the problems.

There are very important and practical issues raised by following this alternative route which says, let's look to material conditions, to the systems of production, to the needs that human beings have, and to competing alternative solutions to the satisfaction of those needs.

Poverty must be reduced not only for reasons of moral and justice, but also of security.

My motivation was an idea of being able to improve the conditions of life, to try to find a remedy to many of the problems facing the world. That's what led me into economics. I saw it as a way of helping people.

I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

Brazil has a lot of issues that are similar to a lot of countries in Latin America, but the dominant issue Brazil is dealing with is poverty and political corruption.

My top most priority is to deal with India's massive social and economic problems, so that chronic poverty, ignorance and disease can be conquered in a reasonably short period of time.

Revolutions break out when opposite parties, the rich and the poor, are equally balanced, and there is little or nothing between them.

The developing world is poor. It needs capital.

Attacking poverty is very expensive, and means doing things politically that are either impossible or very difficult to bring off.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

The only remedy for Mexico's poverty which has appealed to our politicians has been to contract foreign loans, which have never been paid, and to invite foreign capital to invest in Mexico.

We are sons of the Mexican Revolution, a revolution of the poor seeking, bread and justice. Our revolution will not be armed, but we want the existing social order to dissolve, we want a new social order.

People who have been empowered by positive change are demanding quick solutions to current problems.

We want to be a country with a competitive edge in the world. And a country with a solid democracy. To do that, we need to attack the social problems, and extreme poverty is probably the worst of those.

When the World Economic Forum was established in 1971, the global population was four billion, of which 50% lived in poverty.

The 'Alliance for Progress' was a political proposal to improve conditions. It was aimed at lowering the social difference between cultures.