Quotes from Bob Harris

India's linguistic diversity surprises many Westerners, but there are nearly thirty languages in India with at least a million native speakers. There are more native speakers of Tamil on our planet than of Italian. Likewise, more people speak Punjabi than German, Marathi than French, and Bengali than Russian. There are more Telugu speakers than Czech, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Slovak, and Swedish speakers combined .

Our lives take on meaning to the degree that our love and our actions are the same.

It can be difficult to accept the limits on our ability to help others, and even harder to realize the limits on our wisdom, our kindness, our lives. It may be tempting just to turn away, think the worst of the world, and retreat into selfishness and fear. But when you help just one person, or let one person help you, it can be hard not to glimpse the better world so frustratingly near our grasp

A lot of charity is driven on pity. No one needs pity. A lot of people just need access to affordable capital to start or sustain businesses to support their families and their communities. And when I looked closely, the projects I lent money to through Kiva all made practical business sense.