Top 20 Hans Rosling Quotes

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

Good analysis is very useful when you want to convert a political decision into an investment. It can also go the other way and drive policy.

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.

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

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

I am a toxico-nutritional neuro-epidemiologist. It’s the study of neurological disorders caused by a mixture of toxins and malnutrition using epidemiological methods… We are just three or four in the world, even fewer than sword swallowers.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.’

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.