From the Culture of Peace Initiative’s End Poverty Quotes Page:

The issue of poverty is not a statistical issue. It is a human issue.
—James Wolfensohn

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.
—James Wolfensohn

It’s quite possible to arrive in the year 2030 where people are no longer dying of poverty. We could actually help lead a global end—not a reduction, but an end—to absolute poverty...I have always found that a committed, powerful group of leaders, can make a huge difference.
—Jeffrey Sachs

All of the incessant debate about development assistance, and whether the rich are doing enough to help the poor, actually concerns less than 1% of rich world income. The effort required of the rich is indeed so slight that to do less is to announce brazenly to a large part of the world: ‘You count for nothing.’ We should not be surprised, then, if in later years the rich reap the whirlwind of that heartless response.
—Jeffrey Sachs

Wolfensohn comes to the Y on Feb 24 to assess the successes and failures of his efforts to command a broader distribution of the world’s wealth and reflect on the causes of continuing poverty in his new book, A Global Life: My Journey among Rich and Poor, from Wall Street to the World Bank. Jeffrey Sachs continues the conversation on Mar 25 with Charlie Rose to discuss Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.

Related: Watch video of James Wolfensohn on Australian television and Jeffrey Sachs with Angelina Jolie.