Amartya Sen Quotes, Status, and Thoughts

Poverty is not just a lack of money; it is not having the capability to realize one's full potential as a human being

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

Poverty is the deprivation of opportunity.

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

Empowering women is key to building a future we want

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Gender inequality is not one problem, it's a collection of problems.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

If jobs are important, education is important.

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

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

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

No substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic country - no matter how poor.

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

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

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

Democracy is a universal value

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

Globalization has enriched the world scientifically and culturally and benefited many people economically as well.

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

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

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

Poverty is not really as much of an obstacle to educational expansion as it's sometimes made out to be.

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

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

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.

No democracy with a free press has ever experienced a major famine.

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

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

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.

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

I have not had any serious non-academic job.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

When the government is trying to penny-pinch and, at the same time, trying to keep a defense expenditure and so forth, which are regarded as quote unquote essential, the education is regarded inessential.

[The] USA has been immensely successful in making the determination to deal with terrorism [as] a factor in the global world and, similarly, if it took a similar interest in education, it could make a difference.

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.

Poverty is a big barrier if you are at the bottom layer of society, don't know where the next meal is coming from. It is not a big barrier of taking the rich with the poor in a big society to provide schooling for all.

Nearly everywhere Buddhism went, there had been a higher level of literacy, even in miserable Burma, not to mention Thailand and Sri Lanka.

I guess some of the most delightful moments of my teenage years were when I was trying not just to educate myself but trying to educate others. And I could see how the lives of children could be transformed in that.

I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.

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.

Across the world, in Africa, Asia, Latin America, everywhere, there is a widespread recognition on the part of the parents, too, that the children's life will go much better by being educated. And that applies to girls as well as boys.

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.

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.

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.

The fact that schools can actually be a major factor in cementing the world is a factor that's worth considering, the fact that we all have a shared human identity in addition to many other identities.

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.

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.

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?

One has to bring the multidimensional impact that schooling makes in the lives of people. There's nothing like it, and I think the importance of it has to be shaken into people's understanding and determination.

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.

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.

There's absolutely no reason why at the level of basic schooling that there should be any inequity whatsoever. And [that's] the first direction to go, [but] that need not prevent you from doing all the other equalities that you want.

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.

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.

If the government is vulnerable to public opinion, then famines are a dreadfully bad thing to have. You can’t win many elections after a famine, and you don’t like being criticized by newspapers, opposition parties in parliament, and so on. Democracy gives the government an immediate political incentive to act.

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.

There are some people who say that they’re concerned only with poverty but not inequality. But I don’t think that is a sustainable thought. A lot of poverty is, in fact, inequality because of the connection between income and capability—having adequate resources to take part in the life of the community.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Education could be a great vehicle for gender equity. It allows people to see what your rights are by reading. Quite often women, for example, may have rights that they are not in the position to actually make use of.

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.

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. joy.

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.

Your voice is much more articulate and people listen to you if you've been to school. In family decisions, not surprisingly, the biggest impact in reducing fertility is girls' education.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Each human being is a citizen of the world. We have many identities, of which one of the identities is our human identity. And that's something that the schools can provide, but that requires again a vision rather than being centers of hatred. It could be an enormous opportunity to give that mission.

Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty, which robs people of the freedom to satisfy hunger; or to achieve sufficient nutrition, or to obtain remedies for treatable illnesses or the opportunity to be adequatley clothed or sheltered, or to enjoy clean water or sanitary facilities.

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

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.

I really do believe that education, despite this massive potential in transforming human lives, has not received the kind of attention that people should have given to it.

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.

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.

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.

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.