Gary A. Haugen Quotes & Sayings

As Dr. Hamid Rashid, the senior Bangladeshi economist and a leader of the UNDP's Legal Empowerment of the Poor program, has flatly stated: "With limited and insecure land rights, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the poor to overcome poverty."80 And once again, it is the women in the developing world who are most devastated by the lawless chaos of insecure property rights. In the absence of clear and documented legal rights to property, there are two other social forces that step into the vacuum and settle who gets what: 1) brute force, and 2) traditional cultural norms. And under both influences women generally lose - and brutally so. — Gary A. Haugen

She had a certain guarded melancholy, no doubt, but no despair" (44). — Gary A. Haugen

the poor don't have much in the way of money or possessions to steal - so it turns out that the most profitable thing to steal is the whole person. — Gary A. Haugen

Violence in the developing world is like grief in the developed world - it's everywhere, but we just don't see it. — Gary A. Haugen

One would hope that if the world woke up to such a reality, it would swiftly acknowledge and respond to the disaster - but tragically, the world has neither woken up to the reality nor responded in a way that offers meaningful hope for the poor. It has mostly said and done nothing. And as we shall see, the failure to respond to such a basic need - to prioritize criminal justice systems that can protect poor people from common violence - has had a devastating impact on two great struggles that made heroic progress in the last century but have stalled out for the poorest in the twenty-first century: namely, the struggle to end severe poverty and the fight to secure the most basic human rights. — Gary A. Haugen