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Quote by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a French philosopher, writer, and composer, considered one of the most important figures of the Enlightenment. His works have had a profound impact on subsequent literature, political, and social theories. more

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“Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money. This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption. This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency.”

PoorMoneyPovertyEconomyEnvironmentSustainabilityEfficiencySystemScarcitySocioeconomicsZeitgeist MovementArtificial Scarcity
Author:Peter Joseph
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“All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”

LifeWealthPovertyDestinyHealthSicknessMutualityInterrelations
Author:Martin Luther King Jr.
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“But then it is easy, too easy, to sermonize about the dangers of paternalism and the need to take responsibility for our own lives, from the comfort of our couch in our safe and sanitary home. Aren't we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it?”

PovertyPaternalismSkeptics
Book:Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
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“I began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of a lack of resources… And I began to see there was something that, at that time, seemed to me almost as important as being a famous researcher or making some substantial contribution to medical science, and this was helping those people.”

Poverty
Book:The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey
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