Top 40 Jeffrey Sachs Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “At the most basic level, the key to ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest of the poor to get their foot on the ladder of development.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

2. “History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

3. “Extreme poverty is the best breeding ground on earth for disease, political instability, and terrorism.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

4. “We need to defend the interests of those whom we’ve never met and never will.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

5. “Let the future say of our generation that we sent forth mighty currents of hope and that we worked together to heal the world.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

6. “Without restoring an ethos of social responsibility, there can be no meaningful and sustained economic recovery.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

7. “The essence of Africa’s crisis is fundamentally its extreme poverty and therefore its inability to mobilize out of its own resources even the barest of minimum resources to address any of the public health crises that Africa faces.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

8. “Soil mapping is one of the pillars to the challenge of sustainable development.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

9. “There is no economic imperative that will condemn us to deplete our vital resource base, but neither is there an invisible hand that will prevent us from doing so.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

10. “I think the IMF helped to detonate the Indonesian crisis.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

11. “Our challenge, our generation’s unique challenge, is learning to live peacefully and sustainably in an extraordinarily crowded world. Our planet is crowded to an unprecendented degree. It is bursting at the seams. It’s bursting at the seams in human terms, in economic terms, and in ecological terms.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

12. “Unfortunately, the real focus in this country has not been on the rest of the world. It’s been on our own issues and our own problems. Fair enough. But it means that our simple hopes that everything will just work out abroad aren’t really coming to pass.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

13. “The basic idea was that if a country would put its economy as an integrated piece of the world system, that it would benefit from that with economic growth. I concur with that basic view.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

14. “Deep down, if we really accept that their lives – African lives – are equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. Its an uncomfortable truth.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

15. “The essence of Africa’s crises is fundamentally it’s extreme poverty.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

16. “Globalization was a deep trend pushed by technology and right ideas, as much as anything else.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

17. “My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops, but that there are too few.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

18. “The defining challenge of the 21st century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

19. “The longer you wait, the less fun. If you wait until the bitter end, the whole economy can be destroyed.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

20. “The great leaders of the second world war alliance, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, understood the twin sides of destruction and salvation. Their war aims were not only to defeat fascism, but to create a world of shared prosperity.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

21. “The Russian drama began at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union mercifully ended. Russia and 14 other new countries emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Every one of those 15 new states faced a profound historical, economic, financial, social and political challenge.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

22. “In Asia, a lot of successful economies that had been living on their own saving, decided to open up their financial markets to international capital in the early 1990s. So here were countries doing quite well, but they decided to borrow a bit more and do even better.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

23. “This is our greatest challenge: learning to live in a crowded and interconnected world that is creating unprecedented pressures on human society and on the physical environment.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

24. “Knowing that an economy is in decline is not enough. We must know why the economy is failing to achieve economic growth if we are to take steps to establish or reestablish it.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

25. “The truth of good economic doctoring is to know the general principles, and to really know the specifics. To understand the context, and also, to understand that an economy may need some tender loving care, not just the so-called hard truths, if it’s going to get by.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

26. “We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world’s greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst, and then we enter depression? Well, some things are not different.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

27. “The runs started in Thailand after the IMF intervened in such a dramatic way. Then the IMF came to Indonesia.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

28. “It’s the American leadership that has not played the role it should be playing and that leaders in other countries have been playing.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

29. “I believe myself that there’s a great deal more interest and engagement among Americans than our politicians recognize.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

30. “In my view, there is an urgent need to communicate with the public and help to explain where there is consensus, and where are there doubts about the issues of sustainable development.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

31. “My colleagues and I took a stand in our work several years ago that we would not look for the magic bullet, because there is none. These are just basic problems requiring basic work. Nothing magic about it.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

32. “Russia has gone through eight years of continuing economic pain.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

33. “We’ve taken the view that if the rest of the world would democratize and create market economies, that would spread the benefits of prosperity around the world, and that it would enhance our own prosperity, and our own stability and security, as well.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

34. “We were proposing, in a sense, that the rest of the world be made safe for American ideas, as they adopted intellectual property rights that gave patent protection to our very innovative economy.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

35. “Roosevelt talked not only about Freedom from Fear, but also Freedom from Want.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

36. “The idea that the UN system could provide real leadership on the great development challenges will strain credulity in some quarters.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

37. “Devaluations are never easy.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

38. “If you have a lot of short-term debt, it means that all of that money can be demanded in a very short period of time. Technically, short-term debt means money that’s coming due within a year. Typically, it means money that’s coming due within 30 to 90 days.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

39. “White House and State Department foreign-policy experts are overwhelmingly directed towards military and diplomatic issues, not development issues.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

40. “The idea that UN commitments should be followed by action is indeed a radical one, especially for the United States, where wilful neglect of its own commitments is the rule.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

41. “America’s government is not even aware of the gap between its commitments and action, because almost nobody in authority understands the actions that would be needed to meet the commitments.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

42. “Despite a decade of criticism and budget cuts, the specialised UN agencies have far more expertise and hands-on experience than any other organisations in the world.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

43. “Everybody needs to understand that policies are going to change to make it unprofitable if you wreck the planet, those companies that continue exploring and developing fossil fuel resources for which there is no safe use are going to pay a very heavy cost for that.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

44. “It’s not so unusual to run out of someone else’s currency.”

— Jeffrey Sachs