Quotes & Sayings About Factors Of Human Development

Countries with a high percentage of nonbelievers are among the freest, most stable, best-educated, and healthiest nations on earth. When nations are ranked according to a human-development index, which measures such factors as life expectancy, literacy rates, and educational attainment, the five highest-ranked countries
Norway, Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands
all have high degrees of nonbelief. Of the fifty countires at the bottom of the index, all are intensly religious. The nations with the highest homicide rates tend to be more religious; those with the greatest levels of gender equality are the least religious. These associations say nothing about whether atheism leads to positive social indicators or the other way around. But the idea that atheists are somehow less moral, honest, or trustworthy have been disproven by study after study. — Greg Graffin

The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development-and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion. — Nick Bostrom

Plants do not grow all by themselves; they are pulled by the sunlight, the soil and all of the other factors required for their development. A sailboat does not sail; the wind moves the sail. All things are influenced by something else, as all people are acted upon by other things. Our behavior is generated by the many interacting variables that we encounter; there is no one thing that influences human behavior. — Joseph P. Kauffman

Singapore is now in the top five. Its income per person even tops oil-rich and scarcely populated Kuwait. Having realized that the country had no natural resources, the government of founding father Lee Kuan Yew directed massive investment in human capital. Kids who were eight or ten or thirteen several decades ago are now some of the most productive citizens of today's economy.

A tiny nation-state with no natural resources and a large number of people living in a relatively small physical space has managed to outearn a country with some of the largest oil deposits ever found. That is the power of investing in and nurturing young brains.

Education alone may not be enough to guarantee economic success. There are other success factors that matter, like good governance, rule of law, and access to trading routes and partners. But if you were challenged to assemble a prosperous society from scratch, education would be the first building block you'd want to develop. — John Wood

In judging our progress as individuals we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one's social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education ... But internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one's development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others - qualities which are within easy reach of every soul - are the foundation of one's spiritual life — Nelson Mandela