Quotes About Development

Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run, it's almost everything

Across the globe, one billion people live in slums: that is, one in seven human beings.

Trying to separate the contributions of nature and nurture to an attribute is rather like trying to separate the contributions of length and width to the area of a rectangle, which at first glance also seems easy. When you think about it carefully, though, it proves impossible.

You must also understand that with muscle memory, at least two to three thousand repetitions are necessary to help master a simple skill.

School chasers, on the other hand, will have stunning résumés but are functionally illiterate in their fields and are often socially inept. Much of the time, they put so much energy in getting certificates, they never do their job, or their entire focus is spent on getting the "slot," that they never have a chance to develop their team. Further, if they are always in school, they are never home to pass the knowledge on and develop their teams.

Students and instructors will reinvent the wheel by bringing back old discarded techniques, as new or new and improved.

Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.

Did one learn or was one shaped?

The good globalization is technologically driven.

That seemed to be a feature of life in the country [Malawi]: to welcome strangers, to let them live out their fantasy of philanthropy - a school, an orphanage, a clinic, a welfare center, a malaria eradication program, or a church; and then determine if in any of this effort and expense there was a side benefit - a kickback, a bribe, an easy job, a free vehicle. If the scheme didn't work - and few of them did work - whose fault was that? Whose idea was it in the first place?

Not much because all aid is political. When this country (Malawi) became independent it had very few institutions. It still doesn't have many. The donors aren't contributing to development. They maintain the status quo. Politicians love that, because they hate change. The tyrants love aid. Aid helps them stay in power and contributes to underdevelopment. It's not social or cultural and it certainly isn't economic. Aid is one of the main reasons for underdevelopment in Africa.

improvisational infrastructure.

The earth is becoming intensely citified. "The megacity will be at the heart of twenty-first-century geography," Robert D. Kaplan writes in The Revenge of Geography.

The Peace Corps was innocent and inefficient

We have bestowed on Africa just enough of the disposable junk of the modern world to create in African cities a junkyard replica of the West

But now Nature starts doing things. The hormones start rolling and those old testicles start producing and all the rest of it--like breathing. You don't go around asking for it. It happens. It happened to me when I was twelve. (Sean)

You have to get past the pleasure stage, until you reach the stage of tears.

When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.

There is only one way to learn. It's through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey.

Personal growth has its price, and she was paying it without complaint.

No one ever loses anyone. We are all one soul that needs to continue growing and developing in order for the world to carry on and for us all to meet once again.

What does learning mean: accumulating knowledge or transforming your life?

Real love changes and grows with time and discovers new ways of expressing itself.

A flower is not better when it blooms than when it is merely a bud; at each stage it is the same thing — a flower in the process of expressing its potential.