Quotes from Hans Rosling

We have great international experts within India telling us that the climate is changing, and actions has to be taken, otherwise China and India would be the countries most to suffer from climate change.

There's about one sword-swallower per 2 to 4 million persons in each country.

Cancer is awful. It took 10 years until I didn't think about it every day. Nobody should go through this. Nobody.

Few people will appreciate the music if I just show them the notes. Most of us need to [hear it].

Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books.

Health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health. You have to get kids into schooling. You have to train health staff. You have to educate the population.

Eighteen fifty-eight was a year of great technological advancement in the West. That was the year when Queen Victoria was able, for the first time, to communicate with President Buchanan, through the Transatlantic Telegraphic Cable. And they were the first to 'Twitter' transatlantically.

There's still racism. Western Europe... has taken the native cultures of the Americas, the African cultures, the Asian civilization and lumped them together into The Others.

I am not an optimist. I'm a very serious possibilist. It's a new category where we take emotion apart and we just work analytically with the world.

When I have an argument with someone, even with someone I am not very close with, I can't sleep at night thinking about it. It's terrible. But I still manage speak out frankly because I have also been gifted with the ability to read people. I can sense when they start to get irritated with me, and then, I shift.

The number of children is not growing any longer in the world. We are still debating peak oil, but we have definitely reached peak child.

Data allow your political judgments to be based on fact, to the extent that numbers describe realities.

I have a motto: it's never too late to give up. It's never too late to give up what you are doing, and start doing what you realise you love.

While teaching a course on global development at Uppsala University in Sweden, I realized our students didn't have a fact-based worldview. They talked about 'we' and 'them.' They thought there were two groups of countries: the Western world, with small families and long lives, and the Third World, with large families and short lives.

What I'm really worried about is war. Will the former rich countries really accept a completely changed world economy, and a shift of power away from where it has been the last 50 to 100 to 150 years, back to Asia?

The 1 to 2 billion poorest in the world, who don't have food for the day, suffer from the worst disease: globalization deficiency. The way globalization is occurring could be much better, but the worst thing is not being part of it. For those people, we need to support good civil societies and governments.

Fame is easy to acquire; impact is much more difficult.

I have a neighbor who knows 200 types of wine. ... I only know two types of wine - red and white. But my neighbor only knows two types of countries - industrialized and developing. And I know 200.

To get away from poverty, you need several things at the same time: school, health, and infrastructure - those are the public investments. And on the other side, you need market opportunities, information, employment, and human rights.

I meet so many that think population growth is a major problem in regard to climate change. But the number of children born per year in the world has stopped growing since 1990. The total number of children below 15 years of age in the world are now relatively stable around 2 billion.

I loved statistics from a young age. And I studied very much in Sweden. I used to be in the upper quarter of all courses I attended. But in St. John's, I was in the lower quarter. And the fact was that Indian students studied harder than we did in Sweden. They read the textbook twice, or three times or four times.

Beyond 2050 the world population may start to decrease if women across the world will have, on average, less than 2 children. But that decrease will be slow.

My best friend in medical school was a magician. And we were shown an X-ray of a sword-swallower, and I tried it and failed. Then I got a sword-swallower as a patient, and he taught me.

Well, the truth is I'm very scared for people to dislike me. I have conflict-avoidance.