The one message that we are trying to promote all the time, that poverty in the world is an artificial creation. It doesn't belong to human civilization, and we can change that, we can make people come out of poverty and have the real state of affairs. So the only thing we have to do is to redesign our institutions and policies, and there will be no people who will be suffering from poverty. So I would hope that this award will make this message heard many times, and in a kind of forceful way, so that people start believing that we can create a poverty-free world. That's what I would like to do.

Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and founder of Grameen Bank

"We need to coordinate environmental protection and social measures with the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. We have to pull together. Just as in the context of the social market economy social and economic justice was always part of a worthwhile society - at least, that is our experience - I believe this should also be the case in any future world order."

Dr. Angela Merkel
Federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany
Chancellor Merkel's Opening Address at the WEF 2006

Gore said what is needed today is a "global Marshall Plan" to save the world's environment and give billions of dispossessed people the tools needed to participate in the marketplace in a rational way.

Al Gore
Former US Vice-President

"The collective und concentrated power of the world´s civil society hold´s the potential to reach incredible things - without the use of weapons and military strenght."

Harry Belafonte
Singer and UNICEF-Ambassador

"We do not need new promises. We have to begin to keep the promises we already made."

Kofi Annan
UN-General Secretary

"In this context the successfull European model of regional integration and ecosocial market economy can play an important role. It is up to us, as "civil power" Europe, to build up a strong self-conception as a global actor and to make best possible and constructive use of the attractiveness of our ideas. To stand up for openness and global equity - while at the same time demanding good governance in the respective countries - this is what I see as the task and the responsibility of the European Foreign Policy in the 21st century. The original Marshall plan, financed by the US, has built the financial basis for Europes economic uprise and peaceful European integration. With a Global Marshall Plan we can bring in our experiences on an international level."

Benita Ferrero-Waldner
EU Foreign Affairs Commissioner

"Our survival as a species is severely threatened by the culture of consumerism and greed unleashed by unregulated commerce and cultures of hates and fear unleashed by wars and terrorism. The current model of globalisation is globalising violence, non-sustainability, economic inequality and social injustice. We need to create rules for the globalisation of peace justice and sustainability. A planetary Marshall plan needs to safeguard the ecological space for all species and all societies, protect the political space for all cultures, and secure the economic space for all humans. This is the security agenda for our insecure times."

Vandana Shiva
Research Foundation for Science, Alternative Nobel Prize Laureate

"Today an equally daunting situation exists in third world countries. More than two billion people live on less than two dollars per day. Today a second Marshall Plan funded by the US, the European Community, Japan, and other rich countries [including oil producers] could eliminate poverty as a source of conflict and terrorism while extending justice, human dignity and human rights to the down-trodden of the world."

Oscar Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga
Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras

"You can't imagine what it means to the village women in Bangladesh to know that people in far away Europe are committed to a fairer world. With deep conviction, I wish this long awaited initiative all success."

Bibi Russell
fashion designer, model and founder of "Fashion for Development", Bangladesh

"A Global Marshall Plan, to be developed in an open process of civil society, is a democratic counterdraft to the current way in which the rules of global economy are negotiated behind the doors. The trade unions see a chance in such a process to make progress in the fields of social human rights and labour rights."

Frank Bsirke
Chairman Ver.di (German trade union)

"On an international level, there is no democracy and the gap between North and South and rich and poor is getting wider every day. We must intensify our efforts to reverse this development thats leads to a non-liveable world - with the goal of implementing a Global Marshall Plan."

Susan George
author, ATTAC France

"The Marshall Plan was a visionary plan. The same kind of visionary plan is needed today, not to rebuild once-prosperous countries and economies, but to bring prosperity, economic development, and democratic government to places and peoples who have been denied them too long."

Jürgen Schrempp
former CEO of DaimlerChrysler, Germany