Quotes About Underdeveloped Countries

“If we look for love in others without finding it in ourselves, we are like an underdeveloped country at the mercy of industrialised countries. Some may rescue us, providing the resources we lack and creating a tie of dependence, while others may teach us to produce what we need so that in a distant future we may become self-sufficient. Others may refuse to offer support, hating and even fighting us, hence urgently forcing us to find our own resources within. Perhaps one day someone will become aware that we are part of the same planet, and that all resources, including love, belongs to all.”

— Franco Santoro

“Some countries and some people are so primitively religious and so underdeveloped that they don't need a time machine to go back to the past; they are already in there, in the very distant and dark past!”

— Mehmet Murat Ildan

“Toward the middle and end of the Fifties, West European countries became somewhat more important as providers of aid to underdeveloped countries. It was partly due to the prodding of the United States that these countries, as they regained economic viability, should shoulder their share of the aid burden.”

— Gunnar Myrdal

“The use of large-scale military force in volatile regions of underdeveloped countries is difficult to do right, has major unintended consequences and rarely turns out to be quick, effective, controlled and short lived.”

— Dennis C. Blair

“One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

“It is easy to overlook the importance of the young in underdeveloped countries. It is the natural course for nations, and diplomats, and those who publish newspapers, to speak to the established order. Seeking out the young requires a conscious effort.”

— Robert Kennedy

“In the underdeveloped countries, we have young men and women, many of them of capacity but without opportunity to improve themselves. They cannot do so without help.”

— Gordon B. Hinckley

“At the collective level, pride is expressed in the conviction of being superior to others as a nation or a race, of being the guardian of the true values of civilization, and of the need to impose this dominant "model" on "ignorant" peoples by any means available. This attitude often serves as a pretext for "developing" the resources of underdeveloped countries. The conquistadors and their bishops burned the vast Mayan and Aztec libraries of Mexico, of which barely a dozen volumes survive. Chinese textbooks and media continue to describe Tibetans as backward barbarians and the Dalai Lama as a monster. It was pride, above all, that allowed the Chinese to ignore the hundreds of thousands of volumes of philosophy housed in Tibetan monasteries before they demolished six thousand of those centers of learning.”

— Matthieu Ricard

“We think that Hillary [Clinton] will be a symbol and a reality for the women of the world, and it's very important because so many - so many underdeveloped countries, not the least of which is Afghanistan, the women of the world need help, and she understands those issues and is a lightning rod for them.”

— Eleanor Smeal

“What Asia's postwar economic miracle demonstrates is that
capitalism is a path toward economic development that is potentially
available to all countries. No underdeveloped country in the
Third World is disadvantaged simply because it began the growth
process later than Europe, nor are the established industrial powers
capable of blocking the development of a latecomer, provided
that country plays by the rules of economic liberalism.”

— Francis Fukuyama

“This treaty [Kyoto] is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful ... agreement would have very negative effects upon the technology of nations throughout the world, especially those that are currently attempting to lift from poverty and provide opportunities to the over 4 billion people in technologically underdeveloped countries.”

— Frederick Seitz

“Only one rational path is open to us - simultaneous de-development of the [overdeveloped countries] and semi-development of the underdeveloped countries (UDCs), in order to approach a decent and ecologically sustainable standard of living for all in between. By de-development we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence.”

— John Holdren

“The principal impact of foreign enterprise on the development of the underdeveloped countries lies in hardening and strengthening the sway of merchant capitalism, in slowing down and indeed preventing its transformation into industrial capitalism.”

— Paul A. Baran

“The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly.”

— Claude Levi-Strauss

“A considerable proportion of the developed world's prosperity rests on paying the lowest possible prices for the poor countries' primary products and on exporting high-cost capital and finished goods to those countries. Continuation of this kind of prosperity requires continuation of the relative gap between developed and underdeveloped countries - it means keeping poor people poor. Increasingly, the impoverished masses are understanding that the prosperity of the developed countries and of the privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on their poverty.”

— Philip Agee

“Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.”

— Saul Bellow

“The key words of violent economics are urbanization, industrialization, centralization, efficiency, quantity, speed ... The problem of evolving a nonviolent way of economic life [in the West] and that of developing the underdeveloped countries may well turn out to be largely identical.”

— E. F. Schumacher

“Capitalist exploitation and cartels and monopolies are the enemies of underdeveloped countries. On the other hand a regime which is completely oriented towards the people as a whole and based on the principle that man is the most precious of all possessions, will allow us to go forward more quickly and more harmoniously, and thus make impossible that caricature of society where all economic and political power is held in the hands of a few who regard the nation as a whole with scorn and contempt.”

— Frantz Fanon

“Your company ... will send drugs to all the underdeveloped countries of the world, and since they do not have any standards, we will fool them all and can make a great big profit and never tell the doctors that there is a risk ... You will meet the standards of the country in which you are advertising, not the ... proper standard ... I would think that you would not sleep at night ... I do not think this country will not stand for it.”

— Gaylord Nelson

“The imbalance between developed and underdeveloped countries - caused by the relationships of dependence - becomes more acute if the cultural point of view is taken into consideration.”

— Gustavo Gutiérrez

“How can it be "mutually beneficial" to sell at world market prices the raw materials that cost the underdeveloped countries immeasurable sweat and suffering.”

— Che Guevara