James Wolfensohn quotes:

Well the specific role of the World Bank is to be ready with financial assistance immediately after this emergency takes place because you need to reconnect water, you need to reconnect power, you need roads, you need bridges, and that has to be done urgently.

As you look at the flow of Muslim fundamentalism, or fundamentalism in various areas and various religions, they all play on the people who have very little.

So the first thing you need to do about conflict is to prevent it, and the best way of preventing it is by dealing with the question of poverty.

Today, you have 20 percent of the world controlling 80 percent of the Gross Domestic Product; you've got a $30 trillion (US) world economy, and $24 trillion of it is in the developed countries... These inequities can't exist. So if you are talking about systemic breakdown, I think you have to look in terms of social breakdown.

If you have Palestinians who have no hope, who don't have a job, who've used up all their resources, the notion of getting rid of violence is a dream.

The notion of the world as a village is becoming a reality.

We have three billion people, half the world's population today, living on less than two dollars a day.

Ownership is a sine qua non of sustainable development.

The first thing that you need to deal with is the issue of equity and poverty.

I was deeply concerned then, and have become more concerned since, that unless we can deal with the questions of development and the questions of poverty, there's no way that we're going to have a peaceful world for our children.

We have three billion people, half the world's population today, living on less than two dollars a day."

The issue of poverty is not a statistical issue. It is a human issue.

The future is in our hands. We are not hapless bystanders. We can influence whether we have a planet of peace, social justice, equity, and growth or a planet of unbridgeable differences between peoples, wasted resources, corruption, and terror.

What we need to do is increase the totality of money that is given to the poorest areas and then we can do more on prevention but we have crucial needs at the moment just to get people out of poverty and to get the eight hundred million people that go to bed at night hungry, give them some food and some hope.

In this time of globalization, with all its advantages, the poor are the most vulnerable to having their traditions, relationships and knowledge and skills ignored and denigrated, and experiencing development with a great sense of trauma, loss and social disconnectedness.

If you're changing the status quo, whatever move you make is disrupting something else.

But when someone is on a winning horse, and everything looks wonderful, it's very hard as an outsider to persuade them something is wrong.

Too many of the conflicts which are caused today are caused by the problems that emerge from people who are in poverty.