Hans Rosling

“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.”

“Fame is a dangerous thing. It's what the post-industrial society wants. They want fame and many followers on Twitter. But to really make the world understandable, that challenge is remaining.”

“I've done a lot of practical anthropology, living in villages with people and realizing how difficult it is to get out of poverty. When in poverty, people use their skill to avoid hunger. They can't use it for progress.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You have to fit in sometimes to make people comfortable to listen to you.”

“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.”

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

“Avoid war, because that always pushes human beings backward.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“The shining star in the world is Shanghai. That's what CEOs from big companies say - 'if I want mathematical analytical work done, it's done in China.'”

“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 mother explained the magic with this washing machine the very, very first day. She said, 'Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.' Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children's books.”

“There is still a severe and scary amount of extreme poverty in rural parts of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma and sub-Saharan Africa.”

“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.”

“My interest is not data, it's the world. And part of world development you can see in numbers. Others, like human rights, empowerment of women, it's very difficult to measure in numbers.”

“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.”