Third World Quotes

“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

[Inaugural Address, January 20 1961]”
― John F. Kennedy

“People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“My first world is humanity. My second world is humanism. And, I live in the third world being merely a human.”
― Santosh Kalwar

“The U.S. will never be a free and happy nation while they continue to exploit and marginalize the Third World. The Third World will never be happy or free so long as there is a First World stuck in the mire of consumerism, alienation, indifference. (Clodovis Boff, p. 161)”
― Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation

“Question: Which Mediterranean government shares all of Ronald Reagan's views on international terrorism, the present danger of Soviet advance, the hypocrisy of the United Nations, the unreliability of Europe, the perfidy of the Third World and the need for nuclear defense policy? Question: Which Mediterranean government is Ronald Reagan trying, with the help of George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, to replace with a government led by a party which professes socialism and which contains extreme leftists?

If you answered 'the government of Israel' to both of the above, you know more about political and international irony than the President does.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth [...]”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“First, people should open their eyes to see structural sin, which is the very existence of a First and Third World. As long as there's a First World, there won't be peace because there won't be justice or sharing. (Pedro Casaldaliga, p. 243)”
― Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation

“Those who replace love in people’s life with bread, are deceitful, and call their deceit “pious”.”
― Alireza Salehi Nejad, The Third World: Country or People

“Pious” is a sword that the clever always use it to eliminate the truth.”
― Alireza Salehi Nejad, The Third World: Country or People

“Nowadays, our leaders prefer to search for the causes of crime and poverty in the actions or inaction of those at the very bottom of society. The obscene transfers of wealth over the past forty years from that bottom to a privileged few at the top--and from much of the Third World to financial elites in the West--are all excused as the natural evolution of the Market, when, in fact, they are products of unparalleled greed by those who shape and direct that Market.”
― Juan González, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America

“Liberation for who does not have a shack and freedom for who does not know how to live is fatal.”
― Alireza Salehi Nejad, The Third World: Country or People

“Although many of us are struggling against the same oppressive powers worldwide, we are all made to think of each other as enemies rather than allies in this global struggle. We have been separated from each other by the most misleading notion that some of us are citizens of the “First World”, while others are sub-humans from the “Third World”. I dreamed of a time when we all realize that we live in one world not three worlds as politicians and warmongers want us to believe.”
― Louis Yako

“Making women into small business owners, factory workers, and heads of households, not participants & leaders of collective social movements or activists demanding more accountability of the World Trade Organization, the IMF or the World Bank, these institutions maintain control over the economic growth and development of these countries and provide access to cheap labor, mineral resources, and military bases for the global north while the women themselves remain at or below poverty level.”
― Ann Russo, Feminist Accountability: Disrupting Violence and Transforming Power

“[W]ho would have thought that by the mid-twentieth century the darker nations would gather in Cuba, once the playground of the plutocracy, to celebrate their will to struggle and their will to win? What an audacious thought: that those who had been fated to labor without want, now wanted to labor in their own image!”
― Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World

“[Donor Countries]
When are we going to understand
That donor countries never donate anything for free.
When are we going to understand
That the only countries that donate
Are those with the biggest role in destruction and ravage?
That such countries only donate
To shape societies and destroyed countries
According to their whims and their desires…
That their only aim is
To keep the defeated
the marginalized
the disempowered
and the impoverished
In that state for as long as they can…
When are we going to understand
That the easiest way to identify and name the big criminals,
Is to take a quick look at the list of donor countries?

[Original poem published in Arabic on November 12, 2022 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“Exploitation has much more terrible connotations in a Third World country that in a developed capitalist country, because it is exactly out of fear of revolution, out of fear of socialism that developed capitalism came up with some distribution schemes that, to a certain degree, d away with the great hunger that European countries were familiar with in Engel's day, in Marx's day.”
― Fidel Castro

“If we were being absolutely honest , wouldn't we just call [the Third World] the exploited world?”
― Shahnaz Habib, Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel

“I would like for us to dwell on the notion of “dictators killing their own people,” which is quite problematic and misleading.

First, the notion presumes that killing one’s own people is only done by directly using weapons and prisons, as commonly cited when referring to Arab dictators, but it overlooks the many other indirect ways through which a state can kill its own people, like denying them decent, livable wages; healthy, chemical-free, non-cancerous foods; access to decent basic healthcare and good education; and many other basic human rights that are a privilege not a right in the US. Never mind that the US doesn’t even come close in providing these basic needs whose lack can easily make any state responsible for “killing its own people”, I am not disclosing a secret when I say that the US equally fails in the test of not directly killing its own people through imprisoning and shooting blacks, immigrants, and Muslims.

The second serious problem with the statement of dictators “killing their own people” is the failure of many so-called academics and intellectuals who contribute to knowledge production in interrogating it in an honest manner, which, to me means that the starting point is always to look at how the US kills its own people. Once that is determined and confirmed, it would be hard to make the case that the US is in a position to go around the world hunting other authoritarian regimes who do kill their own people. This fact makes many academics and intellectuals—unless willing to pay a high price for speaking the truth—complicit with the agendas of the warmongers who have been exterminating the people of the Middle East for many decades now. As a result, one can’t help wondering whether the real job of many feeble and co-opted intellectuals and academics in America is to simply aid the establishment in promoting itself as a “free democracy”, and consequently aiding it with its false mission of “democratizing” other nations.”
― Louis Yako

“Many expats I know love so-called Third World countries. Many do not mind settling and getting married there while the locals in those countries are escaping in all directions. The reason is simple: expats are treated better than local citizens in such countries, and even better than in their own so-called industrialized countries in the 'developed' world.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

“I thought about how in every ‘Third World’ country that gets ‘liberated’ from its dictators, the first things that go up are luxury hotels and residential areas for Western expats and gated communities from which to administer the newly formed governments in places like Baghdad’s Green Zone.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

“Wikipedia: Global South
Global South "emerged in part to aid countries in the southern hemisphere to work in collaboration on political, economic, social, environmental, cultural, and technical issues." This is called South–South cooperation (SSC), a "political and economical term that refers to the long-term goal of pursuing world economic changes that mutually benefit countries in the Global South and lead to greater solidarity among the disadvantaged in the world system." The hope is that countries within the Global South will "assist each other in social, political, and economical development, radically altering the world system to reflect their interests and not just the interests of the Global North in the process." It is guided by the principles of "respect for national sovereignty, national ownership, independence, equality, non-conditionality, non-interference in domestic affairs, and mutual benefit.”
― Wikipedia: Global South

“In one country, which shall be nameless, when we tried to raise wages, we found ourselves called on the carpet, summoned to the office of a top government official and ordered to stop. We were disrupting the nation’s entire economic system, he said. It’s simply not right, he insisted, or feasible, that a shoe worker makes more than a medical doctor.
Change never comes as fast as we want it.”
― Phil Knight

“For example, the colonized people have ‘regimes’ and ‘dictators’, whereas the West has ‘democracies’; the people in the ‘first world’ ‘tolerate’ cancer chemotherapy and ‘tolerate’ refugees or other religions and beliefs; if you go to work and settle in the West, you are an ‘immigrant’, but when Westerners come to plunder your country and get overpaid jobs (often despite mediocre qualifications), they are ‘expats’; and on goes the list of how we devalue ourselves and glorify our killers and plunderers without even realizing it simply through the language we use daily.”
― Louis Yako

“Most Iraqis I know from all ethnicities and backgrounds see the catastrophic US-led invasion as graphic evidence of how unjust this world is. They also know that the stakes for any so-called ‘third world’ nation aspiring to be independent from the dominating superpowers have become more challenging in the neocolonial imperialist age than ever before. Neocolonial agendas hide skillfully behind a million masks and justifications to ensure that so-called Third World countries remain in that category—that the ‘developing’ world remains in a permanent state of never really developing.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

“Developing’ countries must be prevented from developing at all costs because, if they do, then who will the so-called “developed” world compare itself to and define itself against? If developing countries are truly allowed to develop, where will the ‘developed’ world steal its resources from? Yet, the price of preventing these countries from being truly independent from the iron fist of the superpowers is costly.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

“Third world countries offer third world solutions for the civilized countries of this world.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“A first world country is born of first world citizens. A citizen becomes first world by defying all divisions.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Bulldozer on Duty

“When are we going to understand
That donor countries never donate anything for free.
...
When are we going to understand
That the easiest way to identify and name the big criminals,
Is to take a quick look at the list of donor countries?”
― Louis Yako

“No nation is greater than another. The difference is people and the leaders.”
― Benjamin Suulola

“When compared to the European Union, I find America to be like a third world country.”
― Steven Magee