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Third World Quotes

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Third World Quotes

“[Donor Countries] When are we going to understand That donor countries never donate anything for free. When are we going to understand That the only countries that donate Are those with the biggest role in destruction and ravage? That such countries only donate To shape societies and destroyed countries According to their whims and their desires… That their only aim is To keep the defeated the marginalized the disempowered and the impoverished In that state for as long as they can… When are we going to understand That the easiest way to identify and name the big criminals, Is to take a quick look at the list of donor countries? [Original poem published in Arabic on November 12, 2022 at ahewar.org]”

WarPovertyDevelopmentExploitationThird WorldReconstructionDecolonizationArabic PoetryArabic LiteratureDecoloniality
Author:Louis Yako
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“Making women into small business owners, factory workers, and heads of households, not participants & leaders of collective social movements or activists demanding more accountability of the World Trade Organization, the IMF or the World Bank, these institutions maintain control over the economic growth and development of these countries and provide access to cheap labor, mineral resources, and military bases for the global north while the women themselves remain at or below poverty level.”

PovertyFeminismDevelopmentThird WorldMicrobusiness
Book:Feminist Accountability: Disrupting Violence and Transforming Power
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“Nowadays, our leaders prefer to search for the causes of crime and poverty in the actions or inaction of those at the very bottom of society. The obscene transfers of wealth over the past forty years from that bottom to a privileged few at the top--and from much of the Third World to financial elites in the West--are all excused as the natural evolution of the Market, when, in fact, they are products of unparalleled greed by those who shape and direct that Market.”

WisdomWealthPovertyUnited StatesCrimeThird WorldWestern CultureElitism
Book:Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America
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“Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.”

MenCountryHumorFunnyQuotesGrowthWealthPoorBoysPovertyEconomyRichEnvironmentProgressHumourIndustryCivilizationHumorousCapitalismEconomicsQuoteProfoundPhilosopherQuote Of The DayRichesManAspirationThoughtfulGlobal WarmingSatireWealthyThought ProvokingDeepInsightfulRole ModelsAphorismPollutionSouth AfricaAspireQuotationsAfricaMaximsSayingsEconomic GrowthAdagesProverbsAphorismsMake You ThinkThird WorldAxiomsAdageProverbSatiricalSayingEpigramsGdpAfricanBoyQuotationGnomeSatiristMaximEpigramDevelopGnomesProvoke ThoughtMade Me ThinkIndustrializationAxiomRole ModelDictumDictumsDeveloped CountryCountriesSouth AfricanCarbon EmissionsCarbon FootprintGross Domestic ProductSatiristsOzone LayerDevelopedUnderdeveloped CountriesFirst WorldEconomiesLook Up ToCapitalisticDeveloped CountriesGross National ProductEmissionGnpIndustrializedSecond WorldUnderdeveloped CountryUnderdeveloped
Book:The Use and Misuse of Children
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“FLIES IN DISGUISE Tell me, Have you Really seen Flies in a child's eyes Or heard their hungry cries In the middle Of the night? Don't lie. You can protest all you want About peace And genocide, But unless you are willing To take beatings for your fights, Your display of trendy showmanship Simply ain't right. Go on, Carry your useless signs About an issue the world Already abhors, But it's TRUE Heartfelt actions That will prevent Suits and Senators From creating Any more wars.”

WarTruthPeaceJusticePoorPovertyPoliticianCrisisUnityHungrySuitsProtestMarchGenocideFightActionsWorld PeaceRefugeeHeartfeltThird WorldWarsSignsTrendyFliesCriesProtestingSenatorBeatingsInspirational Action
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“(Donor Countries) When are we going to understand that donor countries never give anything for free? When are we going to realize that only those with the largest role in destruction offer themselves as benefactors? They donate merely to reshape societies and ravaged lands according to their whims and desires… Their sole aim is to keep the defeated, the marginalized, the disempowered, and the impoverished in that state for as long as possible… When are we going to see that the quickest way to name the world’s greatest criminals is simply to scan the list of donor countries? November 12, 2022”

WarDevelopmentExploitationImperialismThird WorldRefugeesReconstructionDecolonizationArabic PoetryPlundering
Book:سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]
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“Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals. The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution, itself inspired by the French Revolution. The French regime could not allow its lucrative Santo Domingo to go free, and would not allow the Haitian people to live within the realm of the Enlightenment's " Rights of Man." The Haitians nonetheless triumphed, and Haiti became the first modern colony to win its independence. The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home emptyhanded. As a sleight of hand, the French government tried to maintain sovereignty over its colonies by repackaging them as " overseas territories." A people hungry for liberation did not want such measly hors d'oeuvres.”

WarIndependenceColonialismImperialismThird WorldGlobal South
Book:The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
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“While the opportunity to improve yourself and your situation is a great thing, our striving to build perfect lives seems to have morphed into perfectionism so focused on itself that we forget about others in the world. We work so hard to build the ultimate luxury sedan, to embody society's standard of beauty, and to achieve historical scientific breakthroughs that we conveniently forget our family members in other parts of the world who must walk miles each day in their only set of clothing for the opportunity to go to school.”

LoveGodChristianityMindfulnessThird WorldFirst World
Book:Faith Postures: Cultivating Christian Mindfulness
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“Wikipedia: Global South Global South "emerged in part to aid countries in the southern hemisphere to work in collaboration on political, economic, social, environmental, cultural, and technical issues." This is called South–South cooperation (SSC), a "political and economical term that refers to the long-term goal of pursuing world economic changes that mutually benefit countries in the Global South and lead to greater solidarity among the disadvantaged in the world system." The hope is that countries within the Global South will "assist each other in social, political, and economical development, radically altering the world system to reflect their interests and not just the interests of the Global North in the process." It is guided by the principles of "respect for national sovereignty, national ownership, independence, equality, non-conditionality, non-interference in domestic affairs, and mutual benefit.”

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Author:Wikipedia: Global South
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“The general economic growth of the quarter of a century that followed World War II not surprisingly created many illusions. In the West, people thought that they had found in Keynesianism the definitive solution to the problem of crises and unemployment. It was thus thought that the world had entered into an era of perpetual prosperity and definitive mastery of the business cycle. In the socialist world, it was also thought that the model formula for even higher growth had been discovered which enabled Khruschev to announce victoriously that by 1980 the USSR would have overtaken the united States "in every domain." In the third world of Africa and Asia, the national liberation movements which had seized political independence, also had a battery of prescriptions which, in a mix of capitalist and socialist recipes, in doses that varied from case to case, would enable these movements to overcome "underdevelopment" in "interdependence.”

WestEastUsaEconomic GrowthThird WorldIllusionsEconomic CrisisUssrKeynesianismUnderdevelopment
Author:Samir Amin
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“For example, the colonized people have ‘regimes’ and ‘dictators’, whereas the West has ‘democracies’; the people in the ‘first world’ ‘tolerate’ cancer chemotherapy and ‘tolerate’ refugees or other religions and beliefs; if you go to work and settle in the West, you are an ‘immigrant’, but when Westerners come to plunder your country and get overpaid jobs (often despite mediocre qualifications), they are ‘expats’; and on goes the list of how we devalue ourselves and glorify our killers and plunderers without even realizing it simply through the language we use daily.”

ColonialismExploitationImperialismThird WorldDecolonizationHegemonyDecolonialityPlundering
Author:Louis Yako
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“Question: Which Mediterranean government shares all of Ronald Reagan's views on international terrorism, the present danger of Soviet advance, the hypocrisy of the United Nations, the unreliability of Europe, the perfidy of the Third World and the need for nuclear defense policy? Question: Which Mediterranean government is Ronald Reagan trying, with the help of George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, to replace with a government led by a party which professes socialism and which contains extreme leftists? If you answered 'the government of Israel' to both of the above, you know more about political and international irony than the President does.”

United StatesEuropeIsraelTerrorismSocialismCold WarSoviet UnionUnited NationsThird WorldLeftism1980sRonald ReaganMediterranean SeaCaspar WeinbergerGeorge P ShultzIsrael United States RelationsNational Missile DefensePresidency Of Ronald Reagan
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth [...]”

WritingLongPovertyThird WorldGood WritingWell WrittenDeveloping CountriesDeveloping NationsBrilliant ProseLong SentenceLong Long Sentence
Book:The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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“Divide and conquer. That’s the global elite’s proven strategy when it comes to its treatment of Third World countries in Africa and indeed throughout the world. Or, to put it another way, order out of chaos is the global elite’s favored tactic. They engineer chaos by financing both sides of revolutions, movements and civil wars then create order by providing solutions to governments and citizens in these war-torn countries.”

WarInjusticeThird WorldGlobal Elite
Book:The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy
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“There has been much talk about the alleged exploitation of the debtor nations by the creditor nations. But if the concept of exploitation is to be applied to these relations, it is rather an exploitation of the investing by the receiving nations. These loans and investments were not intended as gifts. The loans were made upon solemn stipulation of payment of principal and interest. The investments were made in the expectation that property rights would be respected. With the exception of the bulk of the investments made in the United States, in some of the British dominions, and in some smaller countries, these expectations have been disappointed. Bonds have been defaulted or will be in the next few years. Direct investments have been confiscated or soon will be. The capital-exporting countries can do nothing but wipe off their balances.”

CapitalismColonialismThird WorldEconomic DevelopmentCreditor NationsDebtor NationsInternational Capitalism
Book:Omnipotent Government
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“They" hate us because they feel--and "they" are not wrong--that it is within our power to do so much more, and that we practice a kind of passive-aggressive violence on the Third World. We do this by, for example, demonizing tobacco as poison here while promoting cigarettes in Asia; inflating produce prices by paying farmers not to grow food as millions go hungry worldwide; skimping on quality and then imposing tariffs on foreign products made better or cheaper than our own; padding corporate profits through Third World sweatshops; letting drug companies stand by as millions die of AIDS in Africa to keep prices up on lifesaving drugs; and on and on. We do, upon reaching a very high comfort level, mostly choose to go from ten to eleven instead of helping another guy far away go from zero to one. We even do it in our own country. Barbara Ehrenreich's brilliant book Nickel and Dimed describes the impossibility of living with dignity or comfort as one of the millions of minimum-wage workers in fast food, aisle-stocking and table-waiting jobs. Their labor for next to nothing ensures that well-off people can be a little more pampered. So if we do it to our own, what chance do foreigners have?”

SufferingHatePovertyViolenceIgnoranceCharityExtremismIrresponsibleThird WorldPassive AggressivePoverty And Politics
Book:When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden: What the Government Should be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism
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“The dominant orthodoxy in development economics was that Third World countries were trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty that could be broken only by massive foreign aid from the more prosperous industrial nations of the world. This was in keeping with a more general vision on the Left that people were essentially divided into three categories - the heartless, the helpless, and wonderful people like themselves, who would rescue the helpless by playing Lady Bountiful with the taxpayers' money.”

PeopleWorldHeartCountryThreeLeftNationsVisionPovertyWonderfulBrokenDevelopmentEconomicsThirdsAidsCyclesMassiveCategoriesDividedTrappedRescueHelplessDominantViciousProsperousTaxpayersOrthodoxyThird WorldHeartlessThird World CountriesForeign AidVicious CyclesCycle Of Poverty
Book:Ever Wonder Why?: and Other Controversial Essays
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“In the course of his long, turbulent career, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism...scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity.”

WorldHumansLongSelfProblemCoursesCareersRightsEconomicCenturyRacismSolutionsDeterminationThirdsInternationalHuman RightsCommunismPropagandaSelf DeterminationSolidarityIntegrationTwentieth CenturyScholarshipThird World
Author:David Levering Lewis
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“There’s only one Earth, and it’s tiny, but evil human leaders avoid problems they don’t want to resolve by giving them names which make the problems sound like they’re taking place in a different world: they make people not care about other people dying of starvation by calling the place the dying live “the third world.”

PeopleWorldWantGivingHumansDifferentProblemCareEarthEvilNamesSoundLeaderDyingCallingThirdsTinyResolveStarvationThird WorldDifferent WorldsPeople Dying
Author:Craig Stone
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“If Slumdog Millionaire projects India as a Third World, dirty-underbelly, developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations. It's just that the Slumdog Millionaire idea authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a Westerner, gets creative Golden Globe recognition. The other would perhaps not.”

IfsWorldIdeasPainTogetherNationsCausesKnownCreativeProjectsThirdsIndiaGoldenRecognitionDevelopingIndianDirtyThriveDisgustingGlobesPatriotMillionaireThird WorldWesternersDeveloped NationsSlumdog Millionaire
Author:Amitabh Bachchan
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“Proper driving etiquette demands that you basically get close enough to a car in front of you at a busy intersection that it would mean that in certain third-world countries, or South Carolina, you would have to get married.”

WorldMeanCountryEnoughCertainCarFrontsDemandMarriedThirdsSouthBusyDrivingEtiquetteThird WorldCarolinaIntersectionsSouth CarolinaThird World Countries
Book:Rude Bitches Make Me Tired: Slightly Profane and Entirely Logical Answers to Modern Etiquette Dilemmas
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“I really love newspapers. They are disposable. They are recyclable. They fall apart so easily. They are not like iPads or Kindles that can't be disposed of and end up on some third-world shore. And I love the heritage of them, the whole history of mass communication. Newspapers changed the world from being a really class based, feudal system to people being able to cheaply get information that informed them.”

PeopleWorldEndsWholeAbleFallClassInformationChangedCommunicationMassThirdsNewspapersShoreHeritageFalling ApartThird WorldKindlesIpadsDisposableMass CommunicationFeudal System
Author:Stanley Donwood
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“If development was measured not by gross national product, but a society's success in meeting the basic needs of its people, Vietnam would have been a model. That was its real "threat." From the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to 1972, primary and secondary school enrollment in the North increased sevenfold, from 700,000 to almost five million. In 1980, UNESCO estimated a literacy rate of 90 percent and school enrollment among the highest in Asia and throughout the Third World.”

PeopleIfsWorldNeedsHas BeensRealSchoolMillionsFiveProductsDevelopmentHighestModelsPercentThirdsThreatMeetingsRateDefeatPrimariesVietnamAsiaLiteracyGrossThird WorldBasic NeedsUnescoSecondary SchoolEnrollment
Author:John Pilger
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