Barry Commoner Quotes

The combined Gross Domestic Product of forty-eight countries is less than the wealth of the three richest people in the world. Fifteen billionaires have assets greater than the total national income of Africa, south of the Sahara. Thirty-two people own more than the annual income of everyone who lives in South Asia.

You're not going to solve the problems of poverty in the world with less energy.

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

These days there is a lot of poverty in the world, and that's a scandal when we have so many riches and resources to give to everyone. We all have to think about how we can become a little poorer.

Certainly I'll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I've gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.

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

The green revolution has an entirely different meaning to most people in the affluent nations of the privileged world than to those in the developing nations of the forgotten world.

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

What must a poor nation do when its very sustenance depends on the remains and bits that the nations gracefully throw them, once they have had their fill…. Our planet is rich enough to provide for all of us, so why this tragic war for life which has been clouding our lives for generations?

Never forget that there are rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries.

We see a small number of countries getting rich at the cost of impoverishment of a large number of other countries.

People in the U.K. don't imagine what it is to live in extreme poverty here in Colombia or anywhere in the so-called Third World.

When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don't have enough.

There was no Marshall Plan for Harry Potter, no International Financing Facility for books about underage wizards. It is heartbreaking that global society has evolved a highly efficient way to get entertainment to rich adults and children, while it can't get twelve-cent medicine to dying poor children.

The greatest difficulty with the world is not its ability to produce, but the unwillingness to share.

If you are poor, you are not likely to live long.

While a handful of countries and a small number of people are leading ample life, dozens of countries and billions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America are being left in absolute poverty.

The 'Third World' is a term I don't like very much because we're all one world. I want people to know that the largest part of humanity is suffering.

In the past, we spoke of poverty, misery only in the south. Now there is a lot of misery, a lot of bad that creates victims in the north as well. This has become manifest: the global system was not made to serve the good of all, but to serve multinational companies.

You leave the States, and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you.

The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace.

I come from a district where the veterans are not the richest in the country.

If someone offered me a hundred million dollars to make a movie? I would first remind him that there are 850 million people in the world who don't have enough to eat.

On a macro level, four billion people on Earth make less than four dollars a day.