The Chinese have figured out that they have a giant environmental problem. Folks in Beijing, some days, literally can’t breathe. Over a million Chinese die prematurely every year because of air pollution.

I mean, people aren’t continuing like this and not doing anything because they are evil, or because they don’t want to. We aren’t destroying the biosphere because we are selfish. We are doing it simply because we are unaware.

You’ve got to watch the politics of AIDS. The politics of AIDS can work both for and against the victims of AIDS.

The AIDS is a disease that is hard to talk about.

Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas.

The fight against AIDS in China is already well underway. The Chinese government and other funders are providing major support, and they’ll continue to bear primary responsibility for delivering prevention and treatment.

Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.

Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.

There aren’t many things that are universally cool, and it’s cool not to litter. I’d never do it.

Nowhere is it written that there must be conflict between the United States and China.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

I live on the West Coast of the United States, and yet the air that I breathe is sometimes the same air that was being breathed in China the day before.

In 1949, China declared independence – an event known in Western discourse as ‚the loss of China‘ in the U.S. – with bitter recriminations and conflict over who was responsible for that loss.

In Buddhism, we talk of meditation as an act of awakening, to be awake to the fact that the earth is in danger and living species are in danger.

Widespread use of antibiotics promotes the spread of antibiotic resistance. Smart use of antibiotics is the key to controlling its spread.

The thing that’s made me open my eyes to what was happening to the environment and climate was films and documentaries.

The idea that there is one kind of African is, of course, ridiculous. Sometimes African entrepreneurs want to kill you because you are saying public health is the priority, not roads. Of course they are right to press for that issue, but so are we right, I believe, to argue, for example, that millions of children could and should be vaccinated.

I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it’s just such a dramatic success.

The world has been very careful to pick very few diseases for eradication, because it is very tough.

Although I don’t like the way the Chinese do business, I continue to do business in China. I have to. They’re the next world power.

The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.

Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live.

Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.

Reactionaries often describe both Marx and Lenin as theorists, without taking into consideration that their utopias inspired Russia and China – the two countries called upon to lead a new world which will allow for human survival if imperialism does not first unleash a criminal, exterminating war.

The year I was born, 1955, the first big disease-eradication program in the world was declared for malaria. After about a decade of work, they realized that, at least in the tropical areas, they did not have the tools to get it done.

I trust Russia and China and Iran and North Korea like I trust a Jussie Smollett police report.

It is hard sometimes to always be at the centre of attention, but when you talk about me you also have to talk about the climate.

The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.

Remember a few years ago when Congress declared that the sauce on a slice of pizza should count as a vegetable in school lunches? You don’t have to be a nutritionist to know that this doesn’t make much sense.

The ideal thing would be to have a 100 percent effective AIDS vaccine. And to have broad usage of that vaccine. That would literally break the epidemic.

China has to go along with world trends. That’s democracy, liberty, individual freedom. China sooner or later has to go that way. It cannot go backward.

It’s OK for China to invent cancer drugs that cure patients in the United States. We want them to catch up. But as the leader, we want to keep setting a very, very high standard. We don’t want them to catch up because we’re slowing down or, even worse, going into reverse.

China and the U.S. need each other very badly. Yes, we should argue about some things, but it’s not an ‚us versus them,‘ it’s an ‚us and them‘ type scenario.

For Africa to move forward, you’ve really got to get rid of malaria.

The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world, there’s only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease, I think, is gonna be guinea worm.

Our economic system, run for profit and waste and based primarily on the extractive industries, is the cause of climate change. We have wasted the earth’s treasure and we can no longer exploit it cheaply.

When I was 11 I became very depressed. It had a lot to do with the climate and ecological crisis. I thought everything was just so wrong and nothing was happening and there’s no point in anything.

War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn’t surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.

In Tanzania, the chimps are isolated in a very tiny patch of forest. I flew over it 13 years ago and realized that, basically, all the trees had gone, that people all around the park are struggling to survive. It became very clear that there was no way to protect the chimps while the people were in this dire circumstance.

I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.

The tool that’s most associated with the recent progress against malaria is the long-lasting bed net. Bed nets are a fantastic innovation. But we can do even better. We can invent new ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite.

Let us give publicity to H.I.V./AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and say somebody has died because of H.I.V./AIDS, and people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary.

If you can’t eat it, shoot it, or wear it, don’t bring it.

I always thought we had an environmental problem, but I hadn’t realized how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left.

Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows – and china.

People tell me that they are so hopeful when they see me and other children ‚school-striking,‘ and they say, ‚Oh the children are going to save us.‘ But no, we aren’t. We are too young to be able to do that. We don’t have time to wait for us to grow up and fix this in the future.

Public health service should be as fully organized and as universally incorporated into our governmental system as is public education. The returns are a thousand fold in economic benefits, and infinitely more in reduction of suffering and promotion of human happiness.

The United States is afraid of China; it is not a military threat to anyone and is the least aggressive of all the major military powers.

You go back to the 17th century, the commercial and industrial centers of the world were China and India.

I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic human rights. And it’s one that’s easily corrected. The reason I say that is that many of the diseases that we treat around the world, I knew when I was a child. My mother was a registered nurse. And they no longer exist in our country.

I think that once you fully understand the climate and ecological emergencies, then you know what you can do as well. And, of course, there’s a lot of things you can do in your everyday life, but we cannot be focusing on these individual things you can do. We have to see the full picture.

I remember when I was younger, and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears and so on. I cried through all the movies. My classmates were concerned when they watched the film, but when it stopped, they started thinking about other things. I couldn’t do that. Those pictures were stuck in my head.

When we have peace, then we have a chance to save the planet. But if we are not united in peace, if we do not practice mindful consumption, we cannot save our planet.

By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.

On the way back from Mumbai to go meet with President Xi in China, I stopped in Singapore to meet with a guy named Lee Kuan Yew, who most foreign policy experts around the world say is the wisest man in the Orient.

We need enlightenment, not just individually but collectively, to save the planet. We need to awaken ourselves. We need to practice mindfulness if we want to have a future, if we want to save ourselves and the planet.

Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.

I’m opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education, or public health, period.

I think it’s horrible that people have to be told. Don’t smoke! Everybody knows it’s bad for the health. But they have to forbid it.

When the well is dry, they know the worth of water.

Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that homo sapiens have ever faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases.