Jeffrey Sachs Quotes

My children are the focal point of my life. I was asking for a little more time to spend with them.

Countries that need monies so that they can provide health care and education and shelter to their people shouldn't have to repay debts that we knowingly lent to bad regimes long since gone; and all illegitimate debts - debts lent to these terrible dictators like Saddam Hussein, like Suharto, like Marcos - must also be canceled.

Our investments in social justice and basic needs are as vital to our future as fiscal and macroeconomic reforms. A nation deeply divided will not stand. And it certainly will not move forward.

The debts are unaffordable. If they won't cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction; you do it yourselves.

At the end of every 7th year you must make a remission of debts…. Everyone who holds a pledge shall return the pledge to the person indebted to him. He must not press a fellow countryman for payment, for the Lord’s year of remission has been declared. You may press foreigners; but if it is a fellow countryman that holds anything of yours, you just renounce all claim on it.

The call for debt cancellation is welcome, but debt does not just go away.

Far too many governments are cutting back on their investment in human development.

We must work to repeal trade agreements that impede access to affordable generic drugs. We must work to cause the IMF and the World Bank to reduce and eventually eliminate the debt that takes poor nations' resources away from crises like AIDS. We must focus America's leadership on addressing and ending this epidemic.

The Bishops of the Philippines have asked that this year be set aside as the ‘Year of the Poor.’ I hope that this prophetic summons will challenge everyone, at all levels of society, to reject every form of corruption which diverts resources from the poor, and to make concerted efforts to ensure the inclusion of every man and woman and child in the life of the community.

I have much more confidence in my ability, or any president or any leader's ability, to mobilize the American people around a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment to help every child in poverty in this country than I am in being able to mobilize the country around providing a benefit specific to African Americans as a consequence of slavery and Jim Crow.

If we do not pay for children in good schools, then we are going to pay for them in prisons and mental hospitals.

As it has over the decades, the union movement stands for the fundamental moral values that make America strong: quality education for our children, affordable health care for every person-not just some-an end to poverty, secure pensions and wages that enable families to sustain the middle-class life that has fueled this nation's prosperity and strength. Union members and other working family activists don't just vote our moral values-we live them. We fight for them, day in, day out. Our commitment to economic and social justice propels us and everything we do.

I am against Prohibition because it has set the cause of temperence back twenty years; because it has substituted an ineffective campaign of force for an effective campaign of education; because it has replaced comparatively uninjurious light wines and beers with the worst kind of hard liquor and bad liquor; because it has increased drinking not only among men but has extended drinking to women and even children.

It is a mark of a mean capacity to spend much time on the things which concern the body, such as much exercise, much eating, much drinking, much easing of the body, much copulation. But these things should be done as subordinate things: and let all your care be directed to the mind.

Without peace there can be no prosperity for any people, rich or poor. And yet, there can be no peace without erasing the harshness of the growing contrast between the rich and the poor.

Measures should be enacted which, without violating the rights of property, would reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort.

We've been brainwashed into thinking that it takes more monies than it actually does to educate children. That's been one of the brainwash jobs.

Every day in the news we're hearing how rampant violence is in our communities, both here in America and around the world. I believe that the establishement of a United States Department of Peace can greatly help alleviate the many problems that we hear about on a daily basis. Our children deserve so much better. It is our job right here and now to build a better world. By establishing a US Department of Peace we are doing just that. Please get involved ... It's up to us to be the change that we wish for and the time is now to co-create it.

I am going to do my best to try to create a country in which children are not living in poverty, in which kids can go to college, in which old people have health care. Will I succeed? I can't guarantee you that, but I can tell you that from a human point of view it is better to show up than to give up.

More than one-half of the world's major rivers are being seriously depleted and polluted, degrading and poisoning the surrounding ecosystems, thus threatening the health and livelihood of people who depend upon them for irrigation, drinking and industrial water.

The welfare of our children is our main concern, and their best interests are our first priority.

I don't think losing 3 million jobs, having deficits as far as the eye can go, having 2 million people lose their health insurance, turning your back on kids in schools and not funding No Child Left Behind represents a vision.

Soon never comes soon enough to a young child.

People from the world's richest countries should be prepared to accept the burden of debt reduction for heavily indebted poor countries, and should urge their leaders to fulfill the pledges made to reduce world poverty, especially in Africa, by the year 2015.

Five years off my life... I wondered with a wry smile, would people be immortal if they didn't have kids?