Thoughtful and thought-provoking Quotations
Jeff Skoll:
“Someone, at some point, came up with this very bad
idea that an ordinary individual couldn’t make a difference in the world. I
think that’s just a horrible thing.”
“Bet on good people doing good things.” — quoting John
Gardner.
Sugata Mitra:
“We are producing identical people for a machine that
does not exist.”
“It took nature 100 million years to make the ape
stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing
obsolete.”
“It’s quite fashionable to say that the education
system’s broken — it’s not broken, it’s wonderfully constructed. It’s just that
we don’t need it anymore. It’s outdated.”
Jessica Jackley:
“The stories we tell about each other matter very
much. The stories we tell ourselves, about our own lives, matter. And most of
all, the way we participate in each other’s stories, is of deep importance.”
“I was giving to alleviate my own suffering and not
someone else’s. Truth be told, I was giving out of that place, and not from a
genuine place of hope, and excitement to help and of generosity. It became a
transaction for me, a trade. I was buying my right to go on with my day.”
“I did hear stories of change, and stories of life
change, and amazing little details of change. I would hear of goat herders who
had bought more goats, their business trajectory would change. They would make
a little bit more money, they standard of living would shift and get better.
And, they would make little adjustments in their life, like send their children
to school, they might be able to buy mosquito nets, buy a lock for the door and
feel secure or maybe they could put sugar in their tea and offer it to me,
which made them feel proud.”
Jacqueline Novogratz:
“Your job is not to be perfect. Your job is only to be
human.”
“At the end of the day, dignity is more important to
the human spirit than wealth.”
“People really don’t want handouts, they want to make
their own decisions; they want to solve their own problems.”
Muhammad Younus:
“We are not interested in the past of our borrowers,
we are only interested by their future.”
“We are the only lawyer-free bank in the world.”
“The banking system was standing on its head, we have
tried to put it on its legs.”
“Poverty is not created by the poor people. Its
created by the system and externally imposed.”
Sendhil Mullainathan:
“See, we spent a lot of energy, in many domains—technological,
scientific, hard work, creativity, human ingenuity, — to crack important social
problems with technology solutions. That’s been the discoveries of the last
2,000 years, that’s mankind moving forward. But in this case we cracked it, but
the part of the problem remains. Nine hundred and ninety-nine miles went well,
the last mile’s proving incredibly stubborn.”
“The last mile is, everywhere, problematic. Alright,
what’s the problem? The problem is this little three-pound machine that’s
behind your eyes and between your ears. This machine is really strange, and one
of the consequences is that people are weird. They do lots of inconsistent
things. And the inconsistencies create, fundamentally, this last mile problem.”
“Here’s another example of this. This is from a
company called Positive Energy. This is about energy efficiency. We’re spending
a lot of time on fuel cells right now. What this company does is they send a
letter to households that say, “Here’s your energy use, here’s your neighbour’s
energy use: You’re doing well.” Smiley face. “You’re doing worse.” Frown. And
what they find is just this letter, nothing else, has a two to three percent
reduction in electricity use.”
Salman Khan:
“I started getting some comments and some letters and
all sorts of feedback from random people from around the world. And these are
just a few. This is actually from one of the original calculus videos. And
someone wrote just on YouTube — it was a YouTube comment: “First time I smiled
doing a derivative.” And let’s pause here. This person did a derivative and
then they smiled. And then in a response to that same comment — this is on the
thread. You can go on YouTube and look at these comments — someone else wrote:
“Same thing here. I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire
day. Since I remember seeing all of this matrix text in class, and here I’m all
like, ‘I know kung fu.’”
“When you talk about technology in the classroom — by
removing the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom and letting students
have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom,
letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually
be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to
humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience — 30
kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other.
A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one-size-fits-all lecture to 30
students — blank faces, slightly antagonistic — and now it’s a human
experience. Now they’re actually interacting with each other.”
“But when you let every student work at their own pace
— and we see it over and over and over again — you see students who took a
little bit [of] extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get
through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you
thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we’re
seeing it over and over and over again. And it makes you really wonder how much
all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefited from were really just due to
a coincidence of time.”
Bunker Roy:
“We went to Ladakh … and we asked this woman, ‘What
was the benefit you had from solar electricity?’ And she thought for a minute
and said, ‘It’s the first time I can see my husband’s face in winter.’”
“[The Barefoot College is] the only college where the
teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher.”
““The prime minister is 12 years old. She looks after
20 goats in the morning, but she’s prime minister in the evening.”” — on
student governance at a Barefoot College.
Dan Pallotta:
“We send people marching from the nonprofit sector
into the for-profit sector, because they’re not willing to make that kind of
compromise,” says Pallotta. “Not a lot of people with $400K talent will make a
$316K sacrifice every year.” And actually, it turns out it’s more financially
advantageous for these talented business minds to take the big paycheck, give
$100K to a hunger charity each year, reap the tax benefits and get the label of
“philanthropist.”
“People are yearning to be asked to use the full measure
of their potential for something they care about.”
Anil Gupta:
“There could be nothing more wrong than the Maslowian
model of hierarchy of needs. … Please do not ever think that only after meeting
your physiological needs and other needs can you be thinking about your
spiritual needs or your enlightenment.”
“You cannot have two principles of justice, one for
yourself and one for others.”
Asher Hasan:
“It is often said that we fear that which we do not
know. Pakistan, in this particular vein … has provoked, and does provoke, a
visceral anxiety in the bellies of many a Western soul, especially when viewed
through the monochromatic lens of turbulence and turmoil.”
“A rising tide lifts all boats. The rising tide of
India’s spectacular economic growth has lifted over 400 million Indians into a
buoyant middle class; but there are still over 650 million Indians, Pakistanis,
Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Nepalese, who remain washed up on the shores of
poverty.”
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