Extreme poverty is the best breeding ground on earth for disease, political instability, and terrorism.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the global interconnectedness and the moral responsibility of wealthier nations to help the impoverished.
Jeffrey Sachs highlights the critical reality of interconnectedness in the modern world, stressing that the dire conditions faced by the poor, particularly in the context of their awareness of disparities in wealth, reflect a failing of global responsibility. He argues that while the United States and other affluent nations have the means to provide significant aid and support to those in poverty, their reluctance or failure to mobilize these resources leads to continued suffering and injustice.
Themes
InterconnectednessPovertyResponsibilityGlobalAidDignitySurvival
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on global leadership, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of international aid.
More from Jeffrey Sachs
All quotes →All 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 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
Jeffrey SachsRead
Similar quotes
I had displeased the jacobins by blaming their aristocratic usurpation of legitimate powers; the priests of all sorts by claiming religious liberty; the anarchists by repressing them; and the conspirators by rejecting their offers.
Marquis De LafayetteRead
It is a useless life that is not consecrated to a great ideal. It is like a stone wasted on the field without becoming a part of any edifice.
Jose RizalRead
Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.
Julian BarnesRead
It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.
Alexander HamiltonRead
Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.
Rainer Maria RilkeRead
There's been such a sense that there's one set of rules for trillion-dollar financial institutions and a different set for all the rest of us. It's so pervasive that it's not even hidden.
Elizabeth WarrenRead