Top 100 Hans Rosling Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Let the dataset change your mindset.”

— Hans Rosling

2. “The idea is to go from numbers to information to understanding.”

— Hans Rosling

3. “Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books.”

— Hans Rosling

4. “I have a motto: it’s never too late to give up. It’s never too late to give up what you are doing, and start doing what you realise you love.”

— Hans Rosling

5. “I have a suggestion for a new name for the developing world. Let’s call it the world.”

— Hans Rosling

6. “To get away from poverty, you need several things at the same time: school, health, and infrastructure – those are the public investments. And on the other side, you need market opportunities, information, employment, and human rights.”

— Hans Rosling

7. “Nothing beats a firsthand experience.”

— Hans Rosling

8. “Half of the energy is used by one seventh of the world’s population.”

— Hans Rosling

9. “If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines. They love them!”

— Hans Rosling

10. “I have shown that Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees.”

— Hans Rosling

11. “Good analysis is very useful when you want to convert a political decision into an investment. It can also go the other way and drive policy.”

— Hans Rosling

12. “My interest is not data, it’s the world. And part of world development you can see in numbers. Others, like human rights, empowerment of women, it’s very difficult to measure in numbers.”

— Hans Rosling

13. “Avoid war, because that always pushes human beings backward.”

— Hans Rosling

14. “The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.”

— Hans Rosling

15. “Health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health. You have to get kids into schooling. You have to train health staff. You have to educate the population.”

— Hans Rosling

16. “You should not expect the media to provide you with a fact-based worldview any more than you would think it reasonable to use a set of holiday snaps of Berlin as your GPS system to help you navigate around the city.”

— Hans Rosling

17. “There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.”

— Hans Rosling

18. “My experience from 20 years of Africa is that the seemingly impossible is possible.”

— Hans Rosling

19. “Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot.”

— Hans Rosling

20. “The goal of higher income is not just bigger piles of money. The goal of longer lives is not just extra time. The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want.”

— Hans Rosling

21. “The number of children is not growing any longer in the world. We are still debating peak oil, but we have definitely reached peak child.”

— Hans Rosling

22. “Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time. That is how we must think about the current state of the world.”

— Hans Rosling

23. “Never leave a number all by itself. Never believe that one number on its own can be meaningful. If you are offered one number, always ask for at least one more. Something to compare it with.”

— Hans Rosling

24. “My husband is my most valuable resource.”

— Hans Rosling

25. “When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.”

— Hans Rosling

26. “What I’m really worried about is war. Will the former rich countries really accept a completely changed world economy, and a shift of power away from where it has been the last 50 to 100 to 150 years, back to Asia?”

— Hans Rosling

27. “Beyond 2050 the world population may start to decrease if women across the world will have, on average, less than 2 children. But that decrease will be slow.”

— Hans Rosling

28. “Categories are absolutely necessary for us to function. They give structure to our thoughts. Imagine if we saw every item and every scenario as truly unique – we would not even have a language to describe the world around us. The necessary and useful instinct to generalize, like all the other instincts in this book, can also distort our worldview.”

— Hans Rosling

29. “In order for this planet to have financial stability, peace, and protected natural resources, there’s one thing we can’t do without, and that’s international collaboration, based on a shared and fact-based understanding of the world. The current lack of knowledge about the world is therefore the most concerning problem of all.”

— Hans Rosling

30. “It’s not the numbers that are interesting. It’s what they tell us about the lives behind the numbers.”

— Hans Rosling

31. “When in the past whole species or ecosystems were destroyed, no one realized or even cared. Alongside all the other improvements, our surveillance of suffering has improved tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite.”

— Hans Rosling

32. “The database hugging in public institutions is hampering innovation.”

— Hans Rosling

33. “And rather than talking only to people who agree with you, or collecting examples that fit your ideas, see people who contradict you, disagree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource for understanding the world.”

— Hans Rosling

34. “Look for systems, not heroes.”

— Hans Rosling

35. “I remember the words of Ingegerd Rooth, who had been working as a missionary nurse in Congo and Tanzania before she became my mentor. She always told me, “In the deepest poverty you should never do anything perfectly. If you do you are stealing resources from where they can be better used.”

— Hans Rosling

36. “Look for causes, not villains.”

— Hans Rosling

37. “Factfulness and the Fact-Based Worldview This book is my very last battle in my lifelong mission to fight devastating global ignorance. It is my last attempt to make an impact on the world: to change people’s ways of thinking, calm their irrational fears, and redirect their energies into constructive activities. In my previous battles I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic lecturing style, and a Swedish bayonet. It wasn’t enough. But I hope that this book will be.”

— Hans Rosling

38. “There was a balance. It wasn’t because humans lived in balance with nature. Humans died in balance with nature.”

— Hans Rosling

39. “My mother explained the magic with this washing machine the very, very first day. She said, ‘Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.’ Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children’s books.”

— Hans Rosling

40. “Educating girls has proven to be one of the world’s best-ever ideas. When women are educated, all kinds of wonderful things happen in societies. The workforce becomes diversified and able to make better decisions and solve more problems. Educated mothers decide to have fewer children and more children survive.”

— Hans Rosling

41. “With beautiful statistics like these, how can anyone say the world is getting worse? The Negativity Instinct In large part, it is because of our negativity instinct: our instinct to notice the bad more than the good. There are three things going on here: the misremembering of the past; selective reporting by journalists and activists; and the feeling that as long as things are bad it’s heartless to say they are getting better.”

— Hans Rosling

42. “Beware of simple ideas and simple solutions. History is full of visionaries who used simple utopian visions to justify terrible actions. Welcome complexity. Combine ideas. Compromise. Solve problems on a case-by-case basis.”

— Hans Rosling

43. “40 Million Invisible Planes In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only ten ended in fatal accidents. Of course, those were the ones the journalists wrote about: 0.000025 percent of the total. Safe flights are not newsworthy. Imagine: “Flight BA0016 from Sydney arrived in Singapore Changi airport without any problems. And that was today’s news.” 2016 was the second safest year in aviation history. That is not newsworthy either.”

— Hans Rosling

44. “Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot. Sure, my foot is part of me, but it’s a pretty ugly part. I have better parts.”

— Hans Rosling

45. “The overdramatic worldview in people’s heads creates a constant sense of crisis and stress.”

— Hans Rosling

46. “Constantly test your favorite ideas for weaknesses. Be humble about the extent of your expertise. Be curious about new information that doesn’t fit, and information from other fields. And rather than talking only to people who agree with you, or collecting examples that fit your ideas, see people who contradict you, disagree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource for understanding the world.”

— Hans Rosling

47. “The fear instinct had been triggered by the sharp needles, the blood, and the disease. The generalization instinct had put me in a box as a plundering European. The blame instinct made the villagers take a stand against the evil doctor who had come to steal their blood. The urgency instinct made people make up their minds way too fast.”

— Hans Rosling

48. “I want people, when they realize they have been wrong about the world, to feel not embarrassment, but that childlike sense of wonder, inspiration, and curiosity that I remember from the circus, and that I still get every time I discover I have been wrong: “Wow, how is that even possible?”

— Hans Rosling

49. “Ask yourself, “What kind of evidence would convince me to change my mind?” If the answer is “no evidence could ever change my mind about vaccination,” then you are putting yourself outside evidence-based rationality, outside the very critical thinking that first brought you to this point. In that case, to be consistent in your skepticism about science, next time you have an operation please ask your surgeon not to bother washing her hands.”

— Hans Rosling

50. “When someone threatens you with a machete, never turn your back. Stand still. Look him straight in the eye and ask him what the problem is.”

— Hans Rosling