Extreme poverty is the best breeding ground on earth for disease, political instability, and terrorism.
Jeffrey SachsRead
Our challenge, our generation's unique challenge, is learning to live peacefully and sustainably in an extraordinarily crowded world. Our planet is crowded to an unprecendented degree. It is bursting at the seams. It's bursting at the seams in human terms, in economic terms, and in ecological terms
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of sustainable living in a world that is increasingly populated and strained.
Jeffrey Sachs highlights that the current generation faces a unique challenge: to find ways to coexist peacefully and sustainably amidst unprecedented global crowding. This overcrowding affects various aspects of life, including social dynamics, economic stability, and ecological balance, necessitating urgent action to address these intertwined issues for the sake of future generations.
Themes
SustainabilityCrowdingPeaceEnvironmentSociety
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech on environmental policy, this quote illustrates the necessity for collective action towards sustainability.
More from Jeffrey Sachs
All quotes βAll of the incessant debate about development assistance, and whether the rich are doing enough to help the poor, actually concerns less than 1% of rich world income. The effort required of the rich is indeed so slight that to do less is to announce brazenly to a large part of the world: 'You count for nothing.' We should not be surprised, then, if in later years the rich reap the whirlwind of that heartless response.
Jeffrey SachsRead
Soil mapping is one of the pillars to the challenge of sustainable development
Jeffrey SachsRead
The key to ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest of the poor to get their foot on the ladder of development. The ladder of development hovers overhead, and the poorest of the poor are stuck beneath it. They lack the minimum amount of capital necessary to get a foothold, and therefore need a boost up to the first rung.
Jeffrey SachsRead
Without restoring an ethos of social responsibility, there can be no meaningful and sustained economic recovery.
Jeffrey SachsRead
Our interconnectedness on the planet is the dominating truth of the 21st century. One stark result is that the world's poor live, and especially die, with the awareness that the United States is doing little to mobilise the weapons of mass salvation that could offer them survival, dignity and eventually the escape from poverty.
Jeffrey SachsRead
Similar quotes
Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so.
Edward AbbeyRead
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden, You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.
Rudyard KiplingRead
Some global hazards are insidious. They stem from pressure on energy supplies, food, water and other natural resources. And they will be aggravated as the population rises to a projected nine billion by mid-century, and by the effects of climate change. An 'ecological shock' could irreversibly degrade our environment.
Martin ReesRead
Animals are our younger brothers and sisters, also on the ladder of evolution but a few rungs lower. It is an important part of our responsibilities to help them in their ascent, and not to retard their development by cruel exploitation of their helplessness.
Hugh Dowding, 1St Baron DowdingRead
The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman's coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
Susan SontagRead