academics

"Africa’s food systems have become fragile because they are highly vulnerable to climate change and, as a result, to all sorts of shocks."

"Improving availability of technologies and functional markets for Africa’s women can be a game changer given that women are involved in the production of ~70% of Africa’s food! Inclusion of women in more equitable ways – in the way they access, use and benefit from improved technologies – has huge potential to stabilize and build resilience in our food systems."

"Africa is a diverse continent with multiple ecological zones and profiles, cultures, farming systems and people. Embracing this diversity through the use and integration of Indigenous knowledge, generating and using context-specific evidence to design and implement programs, is key to ensuring we have sustainable food systems and would ensure greater success of the future food system."

"“the UN’s Food Systems Chief, on How Science Can Transform Farming to Help Save the Planet”"

"We need to make sure that the market is available, to make agriculture attractive. And I think that’s the biggest gap to date that we see. With a good market, people will invest in research, in improving the sector. In getting better yields. But the market has to pay."

"this is the time to strengthen the resilience that already exists amongst us including regeneration capacity, community social safety nets, diversified food and income sources."

"“The key to Africa’s prosperity? Cultivating ‘agropreneurs’”"

"Africa improved food is now purchasing from over 350,000 farmers…that’s the signal you want because that farmer will go and purchase seed, that means businesses like seed companies will survive.”"

"When you find a wife that is helping you, she understands you, she prays for you, she helps you do your work, that is when you start making progress in life."

"woman gains the confidence and resources to pursue her dreams and aspirations when they are helped in society."

"When you empower a woman, you empower a community. Women are the backbone of society, and their empowerment has a ripple effect that touches every aspect of community life."

"The world isn’t an inheritance from our forbearers but a gift we pass to our children. Let us wrap it in the green of trees and the serenity of nature as we aim to plant 10 billion trees by 2032."

"A child who appreciates trees grows into an adult who cherishes the environment."

"This is a conversation we should not even have in our country because accepting it is like throwing our morals into the dustbin."

"As Wheeler pointed out long ago, Harappan civilization is the most spatially extensive of all the early civilizations we know."

"the pitfall of the simplistic view of Indian cultural development, which reduces everything to the tension between autochthonous features (primarily Dravidian) and imported Indo-Aryan traits. ... [the indigenous Tamil framework] was invaded, partly violated and raped, partly adopted and adapted, by the attempts of later commentators to force Tamil ideology into the procrustean mould of the Brahminic-Sanskritic models."

"With a concern to reinforce Christianity, Jones' hermeneutical tactic was to redraw the chronological map of the world. He summarily dismissed outright the cumbersome and long-drawn-out Indian history, which did not fit in with his timeframe. [. . .] The history recorded in Genesis became the benchmark for discerning other histories, and those which did not fit in had to be squeezed in, erased or dismissed as wild allegorical imaginings."

"Sri Lankan monks and educated laypersons found the Western interpretation of Buddhism especially appealing in their fight against the Protestant and Catholic missions. Soon the indigenous scholarship, strongly influenced by Western critical methods, carried on into the present day a rational view of Buddhism, treating the mythic, cultic, devotional elements as inessential to the religion, as accretions or interpolations superadded to a pristine, pure form of Buddhism. Concomitantly, the folk beliefs of ordinary peasants were viewed as animism, or superstitions, unworthy of the rational theosophy of old religion. 25"

"I try to point out in several of my works, including Wisdom Transformed, and in this book, that in some sense the Buddhism that we now believe in is the colonial product. It is a product of Western theories and translators of Buddhist text, who came in the nineteenth century. I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, but it led to a transformation of ethics, a transformation of the way we look at the world in Sri Lanka, and it is foolish to deny this colonial impact."

"Tamilnadu has known no "real" [R]enaissance-like development . . . there was no development comparable to the European rinascimento of the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries, to European rationalism of the seventeen–eighteenth centuries or to European empiricism and positivism of the nineteenth century."

"However, until before the bhakti trend set in, before the so-called 'dark ages', in the Tamil classical age, in the age of Murugan, the Tamil man seems to have had a clear, optimistic, rather simple, very secular view of life, in a heroic age of meat-eating and wine-drinking pre-feudal society, with relatively simple but meaningful religious conceptions."

"Will 2022 be easier? I do not know the answer to this. But I know that together we will make it."

"Burying nuclear, chemical and solid Israeli waste poses danger to the environment and to people's health."

"Her life has been dedicated to addressing gender disparities and indeed fostering equity in university education."

"Her heart has always bled for those women whose backgrounds have contributed to their exclusion in the academic arena, whose culture made preference for investment in the boy-child whilst relegating the vulnerable girl child to a school dropout, early marriage and rearing of the family."

"Her passion and determination to empower women attracted organisations like Africa Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF), which became the biggest funder for technical support."

"A mixture of driven personality and deep seated passion to assist the marginalised and a conviction to serve, further strengthened her determination to establish the institution,whatever the cost."

"Professor Sadza has taken the gender agenda across continents and sensitised most women of positions of influence to ensure they do not to leave any woman behind."

"Women! You can do it. Come to Women `s University in Africa (WUA) and study. Get up and break out from your comfort zones."

"Improving the status of women is one of the most critical levers of international development. Women Excel is one exciting forum created by women for women with the purpose of empowering women in every sphere of their lives."

"Women often find it difficult to apportion resources towards their own education because more often than not they put their needs at the bottom, whilst they care for their families."

"It takes time to bridge the education gap between man and women. Our mandate was to reduce gender disparities where the boy child goes to school and the girl child is married off."

"Prof Sadza leaves a track of indelible footprints in the academic arena, business field and the lives of the 10 481 graduates that have had the privilege of learning at the Women’s University in Africa, the only such institution in Africa."

"The university is testimony of hard work, resoluteness, selfless-ness and determination of someone who was not satisfied being at the top alone. She stretched her hands to pull other women to be up there with her."

"We started Women`s University because we wanted to prove that we can do it. The message to women is to keep on pushing the cart and do not doubt your abilities."

"The role is to educate the whole of Zimbabwe not only the girl child. The advantage of an educated woman is that they become a power in society and there is no way they will raise uneducated children."

"Martin lavished praise on Kristen M. Clarke '97, the BSA president, who, he said, had courageously invited him "in the face of enormous pressure from the forces of reaction." It is young people like Kristen, Martin said, who are the hope and future of the African-American community."

"Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact"

"In the course of its life, fascism shuffles together every myth and lie that rotten has ever produced like a pack of greasy cards and then deals them out to whoever it thinks they will win. What is important is not the ideas themselves, but the context in which they operate. Many of the ideas of fascism are the commonplaces of all , but they are used in a different way. Fascism offers from the traditional parties like the Conservative Party no so much in its ideas but in that it is an extra-parliamentary mass movement which seeks the road to power through armed attacks on its opponents."

"The Allies did not bomb the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz, because they feared it would arouse the wrath of the Nazis; six million people died. In our case, an arms embargo led to "only" a quarter of a million deaths - an embargo that penalized only the victims, for the aggressors already had more arms than they could handle."

"I must say, that I enjoyed it, I must say that. Because those who killed so many defenseless people, those who aimed baby hospitals, those who aimed children while playing, could finally feel what it means to be targeted, to be defenseless... and they deserved it."

"The origins of this horrific human tragedy lay not in Bosnia itself, but in the policies conducted by demagogues in her neighboring countries, especially the Milošević regime in Belgrade - policies that led to the violent dissolution of former Yugoslavia and the near-destruction of Bosnia and Herzegovina, its most plural republic."

"If you kill one person, you're prosecuted. If you kill ten people, you're famous; if you kill a quarter-of-a-million people, you're invited to a peace conference."

"The state cannot block the entity, but the entity can block the state."

"Most American officials viewed Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic as the Bosnia leader with the broadest vision - an eloquent advocate of a multiethnic state. But his power struggles with Izetbegović and Sacirbey and other members of the Bosnian government often isolated him. His colleagues complained that he was difficult to work with. He carried a serious additional burden: Tudjman and Milošević distrusted him. Nevertheless, Silajdzic was one of the two most popular Muslim politicians in Bosnia, along with Izetbegovic. My own feelings about Silajdzic shifted frequently. There was something touching about his intensity and energy, and his constant desire to improve himself intellectually. Although always busy, he seemed alone - his wife and son lived in Turkey. Silajdzic was the only Bosnian official who seemed genuinely to care about economic reconstruction of his ravaged land. His unpredictable moods worried us, but his support would be essential for any peace agreement."

"Having in mind the theory of relativity, both special and general, I should like to extend with pleasure my warm greetings to all in attendance, colleagues and guests, no matter whether they consider themselves as eastbound or westbound citizens. ...I have always compared nations with heterogeneous conglomerates made up of individuals or social groups, all strongly cemented by homogeneous ethical feelings. Such indeed should also be our unique charming blue planet, and I nurse the hope that during what is left of time I shall witness the end product of such a process of international diagenesis. The reappearance of the Halley's Comet is perhaps an omen in this respect..."

"Crystals! Harmony of matter Born without any clatter but with Holy's mighty venture as the sparkling kids of Nature Crystals! Time past memorizing, Nature's story vitalizing, witnessing the world's creation warning its obliteration..."

""He is the cheapest politician Cambodia has ever known." - by Sam Rainsy, President of the Cambodian National Rescue Party in January 2015"

""Everyone knows that the only person in Funcinpec with the influence and popularity to work against the CPP is Prince Ranariddh. In Khmer society, only the monarchy can stand up to the CPP but it needs a nationalist movement behind it." - by Sisowath Thomico, President of the Sangkum Jatiniyum Front Party in November 2006"

"Sihanouk’s son, Prince Ranariddh, I had met several times between 1981 and 1991. His father had placed him in charge of the royalist forces near the Thai border with Cambodia. Ranariddh resembled his father in voice, mannerisms, facial expression, and body language. He was darker-complexioned and smaller, more equable in temperament and less swayed by the mood of the moment, but otherwise much in the same mold. He had his father’s fluency in French and had taught law in Lyon University before he took over the leadership of the royalist forces. When I inspected their training camp in northeast Thailand in the 1980s I noted that it was not well organized and lacked military spirit. It was the best Ranariddh could do because, like him, his generals and officers spent more time in Bangkok than in the camp. As we were supporting them with weapons and radio equipment, I felt disappointed. After the 1991 settlement, the big aid donors took over. Ranariddh became the first prime minister (with Hun Sen as second prime minister) when his party won the 1993 UN-organized election. When we met in Singapore that August, I warned him that the coalition was a precarious arrangement. The military, police, and administration belonged to Hun Sen. If he wanted to survive, Ranariddh had to win over a part of Hun Sen’s army and police officers and some of the provincial governors. Being called the first prime minister and having his man appointed dense minister were of little value when the officers and troops were loyal to Hun Sen. He probably did not take my words to heart. He might have believed that his royal blood would assure him the support of the people, that he would be irreplaceable. - by Lee Kuan Yew, Senior Minister of Singapore in his memoirs"