“More than 1 billion people do not have access to sufficient water to meet their basic sanitation needs.”

“The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitations services and basic education to every person on the planet. And we wonder why terrorists attack us.”

“1 billion people in the world are chronically hungry. 1 billion people are overweight.”

“Four questions about the glass and the water. Is it 1/2 full, 1/2 empty, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be and what did you do with the water.”

“This is why the Liberian waiter laughed at me. He thought that I thought a toilet was my right, when he knew it was a privilege."It must be, when 2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. I don't mean that they have no toilet in their house and must use a public one with queues and fees. Or that they have an outhouse, or a ricety shack that empties into a filthy drain or pigsty. All that counts as sanitation, though not a safe variety. The people who have those are the fortunate ones. Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. Nothing. Instead, they defecate by train tracks and in forests. They do it in plastic bags and fling them through the air in narrow slum alleyways. If they are women, they get up at 4 A.M. to be able to do their business under cover of darkness for reasons of modesty, risking rape and snakebites. Four in ten people live in situations where they are surrounded by human excrement because it is in the bushes outside the village or in their city yards, left by children outside the backdoor. It is tramped back in on their feet, carried on fingers onto clothes, food and drinking water."The disease toll of this is stunning. A gram of feces can contain 10 million viruses, 1 million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts, and 100 worm eggs...”

“Demographic transition is associated with an increase in the quality of health care and sanitation as well as improved access to education, especially for women.”