Michael Bloomberg Quotes

We draw many benefits from globalization that people take for granted. Poverty has been reduced massively around the world. If you look at the Chinese numbers, it is quite mind-boggling: 700 million people taken out of poverty in a matter of 40 years, the poverty rate having moved from over 30 per cent from hardly six per cent now. That would not have happened if there had not been globalization.

If development was measured not by gross national product, but a society's success in meeting the basic needs of its people, Vietnam would have been a model. That was its real "threat." From the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to 1972, primary and secondary school enrollment in the North increased sevenfold, from 700,000 to almost five million. In 1980, UNESCO estimated a literacy rate of 90 percent and school enrollment among the highest in Asia and throughout the Third World.

The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India - both of them doing well. It's amazing how much progress there's been in China, and also India. Those are the places that really matter - they're half of the world's population. They're the places where things are enormously better now than they were 50 years ago. And I don't see anything that's going to stop that.

By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You might think that such striking progress would be widely celebrated, but in fact, Melinda and I are struck by how many people think the world is getting worse. The belief that the world can’t solve extreme poverty and disease isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful. That’s why in this year’s letter we take apart some of the myths that slow down the work. The next time you hear these myths, we hope you will do the same.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world have been lifted out of poverty with the creation of robust middle classes in India and China, which is an enormously positive development for those countries that also creates opportunities for the rest of the world.

Modern science is a catalyst agent to fulfil the needs of humankind. We must ensure that it reaches to poorest of the poor.

Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe.

The human condition today is better than it's ever been, and technology is one of the reasons for that.

By 2030, just a small percentage of the global population will live in poverty.

The new millennium began with a great global dream. World leaders gathered at the United Nations in 2000 and adopted, among others, a historic goal to reduce poverty by half by 2015. Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world in one voice, one that specified time and size.

I am bullish on the global development. I am bullish on billions of people getting out of poverty.

All over the world, we're seeing access to food, clean water, education and healthcare improve; as a result, global innovation is rising as well.

Our investments in social justice and basic needs are as vital to our future as fiscal and macroeconomic reforms. A nation deeply divided will not stand. And it certainly will not move forward.

My suggestion is that we should first work to ensure the Third World has clean drinking water and sanitation.

In 1995, world military spending totaled nearly $800 billion. If we redirected just $40 billion of those resources over the next 10 years to fighting poverty, all of the world's population would enjoy basic social services, such as education, health care, nutrition, reproductive health, clean water and sanitation.

Global poverty is falling faster today than at any time in human history.

For the first time in America's history, poverty is on the run.

The world is at a crossroads. Our generation may be the first in history with the knowledge, tools and resources to truly turn back the rising tide of hunger and misery.

Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine, but is directed against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and economic conditions in which free institutions can exist.

Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows - and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere.

Democratic self-government has manifestly brought benefits to India, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, South Africa, South Korea, and scores of nations all making their way in the world.

Progress in the most impoverished parts of our world enriches us all.

The average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got richer, but the poor have done even better.

For a hundred years we have been one of the largest oil-producing countries in the world but with a 60 percent poverty rate and now we are canceling the historical debt.

Although the Great Leader told us that we have to let the people eat rice with meat soup, wear silk clothes and live in a tiled roof house, we have not accomplished his will. We have already reached the status of a strong country in the military field, let alone politics and ideology, but there are still quite a number of things lacking in people's lives. I am trying to implement his will by solving these problems.