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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.

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.