Hans Rosling Quotes

"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."

"I am not an optimist. I'm a very serious possibilist. It's a new category where we take emotion apart and we just work analytically with the world."

"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?"

"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."

"Data allow your political judgments to be based on fact, to the extent that numbers describe realities."

"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."

"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."

"We have great international experts within India telling us that the climate is changing, and actions has to be taken, otherwise China and India would be the countries most to suffer from climate change."

"I've done a lot of practical anthropology, living in villages with people and realizing how difficult it is to get out of poverty. When in poverty, people use their skill to avoid hunger. They can't use it for progress."

"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."

"Avoid war, because that always pushes human beings backward."

"Well, the truth is I'm very scared for people to dislike me. I have conflict-avoidance."

"You have to fit in sometimes to make people comfortable to listen to you."

"Cancer is awful. It took 10 years until I didn't think about it every day. Nobody should go through this. Nobody."

"Fame is easy to acquire; impact is much more difficult."

"Fame is a dangerous thing. It's what the post-industrial society wants. They want fame and many followers on Twitter. But to really make the world understandable, that challenge is remaining."

"My best friend in medical school was a magician. And we were shown an X-ray of a sword-swallower, and I tried it and failed. Then I got a sword-swallower as a patient, and he taught me."

"I am a toxico-nutritional neuro-epidemiologist. It's the study of neurological disorders caused by a mixture of toxins and malnutrition using epidemiological methods... We are just three or four in the world, even fewer than sword swallowers."

"There's about one sword-swallower per 2 to 4 million persons in each country."

"There's still racism. Western Europe... has taken the native cultures of the Americas, the African cultures, the Asian civilization and lumped them together into The Others."

"The shining star in the world is Shanghai. That's what CEOs from big companies say - 'if I want mathematical analytical work done, it's done in China.'"

"There is still a severe and scary amount of extreme poverty in rural parts of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma and sub-Saharan Africa."