Quotes from Jeffrey D. Sachs

E. O. Wilson has summarized it in his book The Social Conquest of Earth, we exist with a bizarre combination of "Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

A new governing majority will depend on two breakthroughs. The first is that voters, not big money, once again determine election outcomes. We need to break out of the money-politics-media trap. The second is that government be able to translate increased revenues into effective public services and infrastructure. We need, in short, a return to civic virtue, in which Americans recommit to contributing to the common benefit and to cooperating for mutual gain.

The most important concept about our economic future is that it is our choice and in our hands, both individually and collectively as citizens.

expecting to find good twenty-first-century economic answers in a constitution that dates back to 1789 is unrealistic. The Founding Fathers were clever, to be sure, but the cleverest thing they realized is that Thomas Jefferson's famous aphorism that "the earth belongs to the living" means laws from a premodern age should not blindly bind us today.

We need not presume to shape the distant future; we need only respect the prospects of those newly born today. End

We need to reconceive the idea of a good society in the early twenty-first century and to find a creative path toward it. Most important, we need to be ready to pay the price of civilization through multiple acts of good citizenship: bearing our fair share of taxes, educating ourselves deeply about society's needs, acting as vigilant stewards for future generations, and remembering that compassion is the glue that holds society together.

I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization."5

The most powerful tool for breaking extreme poverty is a holistic community-based development strategy that combines vocational training and job placement, early childhood development, educational upgrading, and local infrastructure. Each part of the antipoverty effort supports all of the others. This kind of ground-up development effort must in practice be led by the communities themselves but backed with financing from the federal and state governments. Options

Come Senators, Congressmen, Please heed the call, Don't stand in the doorways, Don't block up the halls…For the times they are a changin'.

I'm 67 years old. it took me a long time to grow up to know that almost everything we hear is not true.