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When a problem seems urgent the first thing to do is not to cry wolf, but to organize the data.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

When people tell me we must act now, it makes me hesitate. In most cases, they are just trying to stop me from thinking clearly.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Back in Nacala in 1981, I spent several days carefully investigating the disease but less than a minute thinking about the consequences of closing the road. Urgency, fear, and a single-minded focus on the risks of a pandemic shut down my ability to think things through. In the rush to do something, I did something terrible.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

It was a magic machine. Because that very day my mother said to me, “Now, Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine will do the work. So now we can go to the library.” In went the laundry, and out came books. Thank you industrialization, thank you steel mill, thank you power station, thank you chemical-processing industry, for giving us the time to read books.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Our press may be free, and professional, and truth-seeking, but independent is not the same as representative: even if every report is itself completely true, we can still get a misleading picture through the sum of true stories reporters choose to tell. The media is not and cannot be neutral, and we shouldn’t expect it to be.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

We tend to look for bad guys who confirm our existing beliefs. Let’s look at some of the people we most love to point the finger at: evil businessmen, lying journalists, and foreigners.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

a single perspective can limit your imagination, and remembering that it is better to look at problems from many angles to get a more accurate understanding and find practical solutions.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot. Sure, my foot is part of me, but it’s a pretty ugly part. I have better parts. My arms are unremarkable but quite fine. My face is OK. It isn’t that the picture of my foot is deliberately lying about me. But it isn’t showing you the whole of me.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

The safest lives in history are lived today by people on Level 4. Most preventable risks have been eliminated. Still, many walk around feeling worried. They worry about all kinds of dangers “out there.” Natural disasters kill so many people, diseases spread, and airplanes crash. They all happen all the time out there, beyond the horizon. It’s a bit strange, isn’t it? Such terrifying things rarely happen “here,” in this safe place where we live. But out there, they seem to happen every day.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Never believe that one number on its own can be meaningful. If you are offered one number, always ask for at least one more. Something to compare it with.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Paying too much attention to the individual visible victim rather than to the numbers can lead us to spend all our resources on a fraction of the problem,

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

When you are afraid, you see the world differently. Make as few decisions as possible until the panic has subsided.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

The risk something poses to you depends not on how scared it makes you feel, but on a combination of two things. How dangerous is it? And how much are you exposed to it?

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund