Amartya Sen Quotes

Thailand's economic development was driven by educational expansion. That has been a very dramatic factor, and South Asia had been pretty miserable in not learning from that experience.

You can’t prevent undernourishment so easily, but famines you can stop with half an effort. Then the question was why don’t the governments stop them?

The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.

From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.

I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.

China had managed to reduce their fertility to a large extent because of basic expansion of women's education, not because of the one-child family.

In all kinds of ways there are different freedoms that effect our lives and you can assess what our lives are like by looking at the various freedoms that we have.

Opponents of globalisation may see it as a new folly, but it is neither particularly new, nor, in general, a folly.

Education can really transform the insecurities in the world into a bigger vision of what we are as human beings.

We live in a world where there is a need for pluralistic institutions and for recognizing different types of freedom, economic, social, cultural, and political, which are interrelated.

I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.

If jobs are important, education is important.

Being able to read, write, do your sums really transforms a human being.

I think education has a bigger impact on the lives of people than absolutely anything else.

I don’t think that India is much celebrated for its democracy. Democracy has been a very neglected commodity at home and abroad.

Belonging to humanity is a great thing for us, and I think the schools can do it. So I think we can look after the quality of education on the school even as we expand the availability of schooling.

I was told Indian women don't think like that about equality. But I would like to argue that if they don't think like that they should be given a real opportunity to think like that.

Even though I’m pro-globalization, I have to say thank God for the anti-globalization movement. They’re putting important issues on the agenda.

To say that the whole of the industrial experience of Europe and America just shows the rewards of exploiting the Third World is a gross simplification.

Ultimately, imperialism made even the British working classes suffer. This is a point which the British working classes found quite difficult to swallow, but they did, actually.

[To organize a school] looks much more difficult in theory than it does in practice.

I think the UN's role - especially since it's not an extremely rich fund, and that's to put it mildly - is mainly to act as a leading thinker of the world in terms of how to think about the future.

[N]o democracy with a free press has ever experienced a major famine.

Human life consists of doing certain things ... to take part in the life of the community; to be able to talk about subjects that interest me and there freedom of speech comes into it.

The market economy succeeds not because some people's interests are suppressed and other people are kept out of the market, but because people gain individual advantage from it.

Capability is just a concept of what is it we're looking at. Now how far we can go along that and what new capabilities become possible is something we have to judge.

Nor let us be resentful when others differ from us. For all men have hearts, and each heart has its own leanings. Their right is our wrong, and our right is their wrong.

While we cannot live without history, we need not live within it either.