Hans Rosling Quotations

I loved statistics from a young age. And I studied very much in Sweden. I used to be in the upper quarter of all courses I attended. But in St. John's, I was in the lower quarter. And the fact was that Indian students studied harder than we did in Sweden. They read the textbook twice, or three times or four times.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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