Quotes About Amartya

#1. I have not had any serious non-academic job.

Amartya Sen

#2. If a theory of justice is to guide reasoned choice of policies, strategies or institutions, then the identification of fully just social arrangements is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Amartya Sen

#3. It is also very engaging - and a delight - to go back to Bangladesh as often as I can, which is not only my old home, but also where some of my closest friends and collaborators live and work.

Amartya Sen

#4. We need to ask the moral questions: Do I have a right to be rich? And do I have a right to be content living in a world with so much poverty and inequality? These questions motivate us to view the issue of inequality as central to human living.

Amartya Sen

#5. Development cannot really be so centered only on those in power.

Amartya Sen

#6. We must go on fighting for basic education for all, but also emphasize the importance of the content of education. We have to make sure that sectarian schooling does not convert education into a prison, rather than being a passport to the wide world.

Amartya Sen

#7. Hardly any famine affects more than 5 percent, almost never more than 10 percent, of the population. The largest proportion of a population affected was the Irish famine of the 1840s, which came close to 10 percent over a number of years.

Amartya Sen

#8. It is important to reclaim for humanity the ground that has been taken from it by various arbitrarily narrow formulations of the demands of rationality

Amartya Sen

#9. The lack of economic freedom could be a very major reason for loss of liberty, liberty of life.

Amartya Sen

#10. Famines occur under a colonial administration, like the British Raj in India or for that matter in Ireland, or under military dictators in one country after another, like Somalia and Ethiopia, or in one-party states like the Soviet Union and China.

Amartya Sen

#11. 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?

Amartya Sen

#12. Globalization can be very unjust and unfair and unequal, but these are matters under our control. It's not that we don't need the market economy. We need it. But the market economy should not have priority or dominance over other institutions.

Amartya Sen

#13. You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable.

Amartya Sen

#14. Human development, as an approach, is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it.

Amartya Sen

#15. I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970.

Amartya Sen

#16. I think that so many of our abilities to do things depend on interaction with each other.

Amartya Sen

#17. 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.

Amartya Sen

#18. Unceasing change turns the wheel of life, and so reality is shown in all it's many forms. Dwell peacefully as change itself liberates all suffering sentient beings and brings them great joy.

Amartya Sen

#19. I believe that virtually all the problems in the world come from inequality of one kind or another.

Amartya Sen

#20. Poverty is the deprivation of opportunity.

Amartya Sen

#21. Imparting education not only enlightens the receiver, but also broadens the giver - the teachers, the parents, the friends.

Amartya Sen

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

Amartya Sen

#23. Human life depends not only on income but also on social opportunities, [for example] what the state does for educating.

Amartya Sen

#24. There is considerable evidence that women's education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children

Amartya Sen

#25. Freedoms are not only the primary ends of development, they are also among its principal means.

Amartya Sen

#26. The curriculum of the school did not neglect India's cultural, analytical and scientific heritage, but was very involved also with the rest of the world.

Amartya Sen

#27. We might have reason to be driven! We live for a short stretch of time in a world we share with others. Virtually everything we do is dependent on others, from the arts and culture to farmers who grow the food we eat.

Amartya Sen

#28. There are two principal approaches to secularism, focusing respectively on (1) neutrality between different religions, and (2) prohibition of religious associations in state activities.

Amartya Sen

#29. But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.

Amartya Sen

#30. The best hope for peace in the world lies in the simple but far-reaching recognition that we all have many different associations and affiliations, and we need not see ourselves as being rigidly divided by a single categorization of hardened groups, which confront each other.

Amartya Sen

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

Amartya Sen

#32. It seems to me to be kind of inescapable that one has to be interested in the issue of gender and gender equality. I don't really expect any credit for going in that direction. It's the only natural direction to go in. Why is it that some people don't see that as so patently obvious as it should be?

Amartya Sen

#33. A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

Amartya Sen

#34. No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.

Amartya Sen

#35. The World Bank has not invariably been my favorite organization. The power to do good goes almost always with the possibility to do the opposite, and as a professional economist, I have had occasions in the past to wonder whther the Bank could not have done very much better.

Amartya Sen

#36. On being invited to the Jaipur Festival, I was naturally nervous about attempting an opening address to such an elite gathering.

Amartya Sen

#37. 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.

Amartya Sen

#38. While I am interested both in economics and in philosophy, the union of my interests in the two fields far exceeds their intersection

Amartya Sen

#39. I think the whole progress over the last two or three millennia has been entirely dependent on ideas and techniques and commodities and people moving from one part of the world to another. It seems difficult to take an anti-globalization view if one takes globalization properly in its full sense.

Amartya Sen

#40. People's identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way - quite suddenly - to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities.

Amartya Sen

#41. We live in a world community, and economic contact has partly contributed to that. It's also the case that economic opportunity opened up by economic contact has helped to a great extent to reduce poverty in many parts of the world.

Amartya Sen

#42. When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh.

Amartya Sen

#43. It's very easy to capture pictures of jubilant people in the street after the nuclear bomb. But there were no pictures of morose people sitting in their kitchens and living rooms.

Amartya Sen

#44. A defeated argument that refuses to be obliterated can remain very alive.

Amartya Sen

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

Amartya Sen

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

Amartya Sen

#47. The success of a society is to be evaluated primarily by the freedoms that members of the society enjoy.

Amartya Sen

#48. Unaimed opulence, in general, is a roundabout, undependable, and wasteful way of improving the living standards of the poor.

Amartya Sen

#49. 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.

Amartya Sen

#50. It's scandalous when one thinks about the people who live in a world in which they need not be hungry, in which they need not die without medical care, in which they need not be illiterate, they need not feel hopeless and miserable so much of the time, and yet they are.

Amartya Sen

#51. There are few subjects that match the social significance of women's education in the contemporary world.

Amartya Sen

#52. The themes that the anti-globalization protesters bring to the discussion are of extraordinary importance. However, the theses that they often bring to it, sometimes in the form of slogans, are often oversimple.

Amartya Sen

#53. The exchange between different cultures can not possibly be seen as a threat, when it is friendly. But I believe that the dissatisfaction with the overall architecture often depends on the quality of leadership.

Amartya Sen

#54. Globalization is a complex issue, partly because economic globalization is only one part of it. Globalization is greater global closeness, and that is cultural, social, political, as well as economic.

Amartya Sen

#55. Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.

Amartya Sen

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

Amartya Sen

#57. 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.

Amartya Sen

#58. 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.

Amartya Sen

#59. Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror.

Amartya Sen

#60. To say that certainly America was very lucky to get a large amount of land, and the native Indians were extremely unlucky to have white men coming over here, is one thing. But to say that the whole of the American prosperity was based on exploiting the indigenous population would be a great mistake.

Amartya Sen

#61. I'm generally in favor of economic globalization. Having said that, it doesn't always work and does not immediately work in the interest of all. There are sufferers.

Amartya Sen

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

Amartya Sen

#63. The identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute

Amartya Sen

#64. Japan became an imperialist country in many ways, but that was much later, after it had already made big progress. I don't think Japan's wealth was based on exploiting China. Japan's wealth was based on its expansion in international trade.

Amartya Sen

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

Amartya Sen

#66. Human ordeals thrive on ignorance. To understand a problem with clarity is already half way towards solving it.

Amartya Sen

#67. Economics, as it has emerged, can be made more productive by paying greater and more explicit attention to the ethical considerations that shape human behaviour and judgment.

Amartya Sen

#68. There are Muslims of all kinds. The idea of closing them into a single identity is wrong.

Amartya Sen

#69. Economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable - and unethical

Amartya Sen

#70. The Affluent Society not only changed the way the country viewed itself, but gave new phrases to the language: Conventional wisdom, the bland leading the bland, private opulence and public squalor.

Amartya Sen

#71. 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.

Amartya Sen

#72. Progress is more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulent

Amartya Sen

#73. Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency. The removal of substantial unfreedoms, it is argued here, is constitutive of development.

Amartya Sen

#74. Empowering women is key to building a future we want

Amartya Sen

#75. Resenting the obtuseness of others is not good ground for shooting oneself in the foot.

Amartya Sen

#76. 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.

Amartya Sen

#77. I attempted to see famines as broad "economic" problems (concentrating on how people can buy food, or otherwise get entitled to it), rather than in terms of the grossly undifferentiated picture of aggregate food supply for the economy as a whole.

Amartya Sen

#78. 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.

Amartya Sen

#79. The anti-globalization movement is one of the biggest globalized events of the contemporary world, people coming from everywhere, -Australia, Indonesia, Britain, India, Poland, Germany, South Africa-to demonstrate in Seattle or Quebec. What could be more global than that?

Amartya Sen

#80. Development requires major source of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states.

Amartya Sen

#81. Democracy is a universal value

Amartya Sen

#82. I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.

Amartya Sen

#83. [Globalization] has enriched the world scientifically and culturally and benefited many people economically as well.

Amartya Sen

#84. The opportunities, income, schools facilities, the basic income support that the government provides or any of these things .. public transport arrangements we have.. all these are part of the way our lives and freedoms are effected.

Amartya Sen

#85. It was incredible to me that members of one community could kill members of another not for anything personal that they did but simply based on their identity.

Amartya Sen

#86. The elimination of ignorance, of illiteracy ... and of needless inequalities in opportunities (is) to be seen as objectives that are valued for their own sake. They expand our freedom to lead the lives we have reason to value, and these elementary capabilities are of importance on their own

Amartya Sen

#87. one must go through war to reach peace.4

Amartya Sen

#88. The governments and the hard-headed military establishment and the general conservative part of America have never taken much interest in democracy, anyway.

Amartya Sen

#89. Anything that increases the voice of young women tends therefore to reduce the fertility rate.

Amartya Sen

#90. 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.

Amartya Sen

#91. Prolixity is not alien to us in India. We are able to talk at some length.

Amartya Sen

#92. One has to be realistic. One's concern for equity and justice in the world must not carry one into the alien territory of unreasoned belief. That's very important.

Amartya Sen

#93. No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.

Amartya Sen