John Pilger Quotes

In 1955, Cuba had a life expectancy of 59.5 years, shorter than Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay… In 1985 the average Cuban could expect to live until the age of 75, longer than anyone else in Latin America and just short of the average American (75.9 years). Cuba’s children were the best fed and the level of literacy was the highest [in Latin America].

A country in which the people are not healthy physically and psychologically, are poorly educated and illiterate, will never rise to the peaks of world civilization.

I will use the rest of my life to help the poor overcome the problems confronting them - poverty is the greatest challenge facing humanity. That is why I build schools; I want to free people from poverty and illiteracy.

When I was giving a lecture in India, the capabilities that I have to be concerned with there, namely the ability of people to go to a school, to be literate, to be able to have a basic health care everywhere, to be able to seek some kind of medical response to one's ailment; these become central issues in the Indian context which they're not in the UK, because you're well beyond that.

Targeting women is key in developing countries. It allows them to go to school, to say how many children they're going to have, which drives the issue of population and how their children will be educated. Women are the best investments in developing countries.

I don't know anywhere where the people are hungrier for education than South Sudan.

The issues of environment, health and education should be taken up vigorously.

In Liberia, the big challenge that remains for us is job creation. We want young people to work or go to school. That is our main preoccupation right now.

I believe technology will continue to become more affordable and more people will have the chance to use it. This will help more people get medical care and a good education.

I really do believe that education, despite this massive potential in transforming human lives, has not received the kind of attention that people should have given to it.

Good roads, good houses, adequate electricity, good schools or good hospitals in the village are indeed, the parameters of progress. However, in my view, 100 percent literate village is the true symbol of real progress.

We have reduced poverty in the world by 50% since the year 1970 - the number of people who go to bed hungry, the number of people that have to sleep without a roof over their heads, the number of people that are illiterate.The world is better.

I want New Story education to be skilling human beings and young people to provide basic human needs. Technology and all other things are icing on the cake.

Without undervaluing any other human agency, it may be safely affirmed that the Common School, improved and energized, as it can easily be, may become the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization. Two reasons sustain this position. In the first place, there is a universality in its operation, which can be affirmed of no other institution whatever... And, in the second place, the materials upon which it operates are so pliant and ductile as to be susceptible of assuming a greater variety of forms than any other earthly work of the Creator.

The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings

If there is to be any permanent improvement in man and any better social order, it must come mainly from the education and humanizing of man.

If you can't go to secondary school, the boys get to go and the girls don't, you're locked into a cycle of poverty, because you don't have a chance.

Place-based initiatives can provide a useful framework to judge our progress in raising people out of poverty. They allow us to see whether or not a neighborhood is improving and its residents are living better.

Development does not start with goods; it starts with people and their education, organization, and discipline. Without these three, all resources remain latent, untapped, potential.

The dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it.

It is wonderful what a difference learning makes upon people even in the common intercourse of life, which does not appear to be much connected with it.

There's not even real *popularity* at my school." "That," Coli said emphatically, "is a sentence that has only ever been spoken by popular people.

An education capable of saving humanity is no small undertaking; it involves the spiritual development of man, the enhancement of his value as an individual, and the preparation of young people to understand the times in which they live.

We've shown again and again, in every UN report on the status of women, that wherever women control their own bodies and have access to education, societies prosper. Men's fortunes go up, children's fortunes go up. This is not news - it's been proven repeatedly. Anywhere those things are threatened, we have to defend them.

It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.