Emma Thompson Quotes

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.

Historic changes and challenges. Breakthroughs in human knowledge and opportunity. And yet, for vast numbers across the globe, the daily realities have not altered.

Poverty and lack of knowledge must be challenged.

What separates developing countries from developed countries is as much a gap in knowledge as a gap in resources.

I think if a youngster leaves school unable to read you're kind of condemning them to a life of poverty and a life of lack of potential.

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.

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female.

A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.

After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do.

While teaching a course on global development at Uppsala University in Sweden, I realized our students didn't have a fact-based worldview. They talked about 'we' and 'them.' They thought there were two groups of countries: the Western world, with small families and long lives, and the Third World, with large families and short lives.

I don't think that people in America are really given enough information about the Third World.

Obsession with the market seem to prevent ministers looking at the huge problem and all its ramifications in health, education and employment that come from the housing insecurity that too many face.

If extreme poverty is allowed to increase, it will give rise to new problems, including new diseases that will spread from countries that cannot provide adequate healthcare to those that can. Poverty will lead to more migrants seeking to move, whether legally or not, to rich nations.

Beyond the borders of wealthy countries like the United States, in developing countries where most people in the world live, the impacts of climate change are much more deadly, from the growing desertification of Africa to the threats of rising sea levels and the submersion of small island nations.

No one should ever be forced to choose between food and education, or medicine and shelter when they don't have the resources. It's very unfair.

After graduating college in 2001 with a B. A. in Political Science and Speech Communications from Texas State University - San Marcos, I realized that my generation and those younger had been given no future and had been maliciously robbed of the knowledge of principles and methods necessary for building one.

In India there are more poor people in three states... than there are in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.

It was a slow understanding that the lack of education in a country like Somalia creates these huge social problems.

There is still a severe and scary amount of extreme poverty in rural parts of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma and sub-Saharan Africa.

Poverty is not a trait of character. It is created anew in each generation but not by heredity, by circumstances.

More than one billion people in the world live on a dollar a day or less. Nothing keeps them poor more than barriers and subsidies in wealthy countries, which cost the developing world much more than it gets in aid.

The problems of the Third World—its poverty, its ignorance, its debt—never really seemed to affect Europeans and Americans. No longer. It's a little warmer than it used to be. The water is rising.

It's hard for people who have never faced hunger or illiteracy to understand how crucial they are to the majority of mankind.

Visible minorities lead in education but trail in income.

It is astonishing to see how little some of our would-be great and wise white men know about the Negro, his ability, his progress, his books, newspapers, churches, home tastes, etc.