Sheryl WuDunn Quotations

People want to be happy, so they don't want to feel as though they're mired in this world of ugliness. I think that if people can recognize that you can actually help and change that ugliness, then you'll feel a lot better about yourself as well, and that does create a certain amount of happiness.

If something is really outrageous, it doesn't matter if it is one culture, or another, it's outrageous.

For lack of a few pinches of ordinary iodised table salt in the diet of a third world pregnant mother, a child can lose up to ten IQ (Intelligence Quotient) points.

The tools to crush modern slavery exist, but the political will is lacking.

In contrast, Western historians, and those in South Korea, say the North attacked the South on June 25, 1950. Both sides agree that after the war began, the North Korean Army captured Seoul in three days and pushed as far south as Pusan before American troops arrived to drive back the North Koreans nearly as far north as the border to China.

One of the best ways to fight poverty and to fight terrorism is to educate girls and bring women into the formal labor force.

We all have won the lottery of life. How do we discharge that responsibility?

When the history of African development is written, it will be clear that a turning point involved the empowerment of women.

If you economically empower a woman, she represents enormous opportunity that can actually be transformative not only for her family and for her community, but at the aggregate level for the economy.

Women are not the problem they're the solution

One of the ways to be happy, to be truly happy, is to contribute to a cause that is greater than yourself. And, through Harvard-based research, we can see that happy people live longer.

Decades from now, people will look back and wonder how societies could have acquiesced in a sex slave trade in the twenty-first century that is... bigger than the transatlantic slave trade was in the nineteenth. They will be perplexed that we shrugged as a lack of investment in maternal health caused half a million women to perish in childbirth each year.

It's no accident that the countries that have enjoyed an economic take off have been those that educated girls and then gave them the autonomy to move to the cities to find work

In the same way that slavery was a moral challenge for the 19th century and totalitarianism was a challenge for the 20th century, the challenge that women and girls face around the world is the moral challenge of our time.

Our focus has to be on changing reality, not changing laws.