Jim Yong Kim Quotes

In my own view, the life expectancy of Native Americans in the United States is one of the really great moral crises that we face.

Unless you invest in people, you are not going to see growth in the long term, the medium term, and maybe even the short term.

If we do not act to curb climate change immediately, we will leave our children and grandchildren an unrecognizable planetIt is the poor, those least responsible for climate change and least able to afford adaptation, who would suffer the most.

Water and sanitation has not had the same kind of champion that global health, and even education, have had.

I feel like I'm calmer, I'm kinder, I'm more patient the more I do my own meditation.

Haiti's economy cannot be built by and benefit just a privileged few. It must be built by and benefit all Haitians.

World Bank is a bank that's focused on economic development and poverty alleviation.

Why is it that when it comes to our most cherished social goal [health care], we not only tolerate poor execution, sometimes we even celebrate it?

We need to have a plan equal to the challenge.

The water issue is critically related to climate change. People say that carbon is the currency of climate change. Water is the teeth.

Carbon is the currency of how you measure climate change, but water will be the teeth.

A lot of young people don't think they can make a difference. That's really what I am at Dartmouth to do. I'm there to tell the young people, 'Look, a few committed souls can change the world.'

Hope is a moral choice.

Growing economies are critical; we will never be able to end poverty unless economies are growing. We also need to find ways of growing economies so that the growth creates good jobs, especially for young people, especially for women, especially for the poorest who have been excluded from the economic system.

I think one of the main challenges that the World Bank faces is creating an organizational structure that doesn't get in the way of its staff. We have fantastic staff. People told me as I was coming into the organization that the greatest asset of the World Bank Group is its staff, and I think there's no question that that's the case.

Social media has changed the world forever. We're not going to go backwards. People are not going to accept being poor, accept being excluded anymore.

Look at the problem of drug-resistant TB in the world. Look at HIV in the world. What's going to be required for everybody in the long run is the ability to do complex health interventions in poor settings.

I want to eradicate poverty. I think that there's a tremendous passion for that inside the World Bank.

What we have found is that because of smartphones and access to media, and because everybody knows how everyone else lives, you have no idea where the next huge social movement is going to erupt.

One of the things I had to really work on is, when you're the leader of an organization, people look at the expression on your face. Your mood has a lot to do with how people think the whole organization is doing.

I like to change people's sense of what's possible.

No matter how good you think you are as a leader, my goodness, the people around you will have all kinds of ideas for how you can get better. So for me, the most fundamental thing about leadership is to have the humility to continue to get feedback and to try to get better - because your job is to try to help everybody else get better.

Today there are a lot places where people say they're just hopeless. If I can come from a hopeless country, get an education, become a hyphenated American and become president of the World Bank, it's my moral duty to make sure that every single person on the planet has that opportunity.

Institutionalized discrimination is bad for people and for societies. Widespread discrimination is also bad for economies. There is clear evidence that when societies enact laws that prevent productive people from fully participating in the workforce, economies suffer.

One of the lessons of leadership worth emphasizing is that you want to get to know other great leaders and take their advice. At some point in your development, it's only people who've been in the seat of having to be leaders who can help you in a deep way.

We will never end poverty if we don't tackle climate change.

Ending poverty and ensuring sustainability are the defining challenges of our time. Energy is central to both of them.

I've always been engaged in social protection programmes.