Global Disparity Quotes

In the West, that's what's happening. The birth rate has been dropping steadily and still is. But there is still a vast amount of the world where that's not the case. And that is where the big population growth is taking place.

When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I've been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that.

Why did the world ever become so unequal?

People are dying because we in the West are unwilling to change and to actually live by the free market rhetoric we often spout.

Half the people of the world are living on less than $2 a day.

I am still fairly confident we will come out better than the West in terms of our overall development versus damage.

Today, you have 20 percent of the world controlling 80 percent of the Gross Domestic Product; you've got a $30 trillion (US) world economy, and $24 trillion of it is in the developed countries... These inequities can't exist. So if you are talking about systemic breakdown, I think you have to look in terms of social breakdown.

North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.

You could take the Internet enthusiasm that was happening in 1999 and 2000 here in the U.S., and in China it was three-to-five times more ebullient.

In Vancouver, in Sydney and in Orange County, we live among fluorescent stores and streets so brightly lit that you can read a book after dark; in other places across our global body, there are blackouts and curfews every night.

The inequality between the world's individuals is staggering.

The differences in income between the poor world and the rich world are so great that people have to be interested.

I know things aren't perfect for women in the U.K. and in America, but there are women in the rest of the world who have it far worse.

It feels like God visits everywhere else, but lives in Africa.

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.

I have a great deal of difficulty with those who live in a hugely prosperous country telling people in the developing world that they should be deprived of a critical source of energy.

Most people believe, more or less, that the value of a human life is the same, irrespective of where on the planet it happens to find itself. But, of course, not every life has the same value for us.

When you go to China and the developing world, people understand more clearly the dangers that are coming at them because they're living closer to the margin. They don't have any of the false sense of invulnerability that Americans have. People from developing countries also feel that it's their right, if you're talking in terms of justice, to use fossil fuels like we did for a hundred years to get rich. It's hard for them to give up that vision.

We can't stop a baby in Africa from starving to death... but we can afford enough technology and weaponry to blow the world up a million times over.

It's pretty shocking that the guys in Europe who cover traditional media will cover Google, whereas in the U.S., there are five different equity analysts that will cover the internet universe.

Why are millions spent on the war each day, while not a penny is available for ... artists or the poor? Why do people have to starve when mountians of food are rotting away in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy?

A European who goes to New York and Chicago sees the future... when he goes to Asia he sees the past.

We're very privileged as Americans - it's easy to forget about the rest of the world and to think that your problems are the most important problems. Even poor people in America live better than poor people most everywhere else.

The Second World War had really devastating effects for much of Europe. It really didn't take them very long to reconstruct state capitalist democracies because it was in people's heads. There were other parts of the world that were pretty much devastated and they couldn't do it; they didn't have the conceptions in their mind. A lot of it is human consciousness.

For most of the world, civil and political rights... come as luxuries that are far away in the future.