15 Memorable TED Quotes
TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is a global set of conferences owned by the private nonprofit organization Sapling Foundation. Under the slogan “ideas worth spreading,” TED events are held throughout the world, addressing a variety of topics, from science and culture to health, medicine, and global development. Here are some of the most memorable quotes made by TED speakers on the topic of poverty and development.
1. “You don’t wake up one day no longer a racist. It takes generations to tear that intuition, that DNA, out of a soul of a people.”
–Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim
2. “I’d grown up thinking that a [sanitary toilet] was my right, when in fact it’s a privilege — 2.5 billion people worldwide have no adequate toilet.”
–Rose George: Let’s talk crap. Seriously.
3. “Child mortality [since 2000 is] down by 2.65 million a year. That’s a rate of 7,256 children’s lives saved each day. … It drives me nuts that most people don’t seem to know this news.”
–Bono: The good news on poverty (Yes, there’s good news)
4. “What you do [to provide better aid is] you shut up. You never arrive in a community with any ideas.”
–Ernesto Sirolli: Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!
5. “The challenge of development: abject poverty surrounded by corruption.”
–Sanjay Pradhan: How open data is changing international aid
6. “I have never met a villager who does not want a vote.”
–Rory Stewart: Why democracy matters
7. “You don’t have to get rich to have [fewer] children. It has happened across the world.”
–Hans Rosling: Religions and babies
8. “We get so little news about the developing world that we often forget that there are literally millions of people out there struggling to change things to be fairer, freer, more democratic, less corrupt.”
–Alex Steffen: The route to a sustainable future
9. “Connectivity is productivity — whether it’s in a modern office or an underdeveloped village.”
–Iqbal Quadir: How mobile phones can fight poverty
10. “We’ve seen how distributed networks, big data and information can transform society. I think it’s time for us to apply them to water.”
–Sonaar Luthra: Meet the Water Canary
11. “Birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda, and the victims of this paralysis are the people of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.”
–Melinda Gates: Let’s put birth control back on the agenda
12. “Human development, not secularization, is what’s key to women’s empowerment in the transforming Middle East.”
–Dalia Mogahed: The attitudes that sparked Arab Spring
13. “The United Street Sellers Republic — the USSR — [would be] the second-largest economy in the world after the United States.”
–Robert Neuwirth: The power of the informal economy
14. “We need to deliver [mental] health care using whoever is available and affordable in our local communities.”
–Vikram Patel: Mental health for all by involving all
15. “It was the buildings [in Haiti], not the earthquake, that killed 220,000 people, that injured 330,000, that displaced 1.3 million people, that cut off food and water and supplies for an entire nation.”
–Peter Haas: Haiti’s disaster of engineering
– Nayomi Chibana
Feature Writer
Sources: TED, Reddit
Photo: Lingholic