Top 153 Quotes & Sayings by Amartya Sen

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I have not had any serious non-academic job.

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.

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.

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

If jobs are important, education is important.

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

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.

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

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

Opportunity could be defined in so many ways. There's one way of defining it, equality of opportunity, which is in fact the equality of capability, but the libertarians got there first and they have - like the Americans getting onto the moon, naming every crater after something like an astronaut - they have got there and named "opportunity" in a way that we cannot get ownership of now.

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

The notion of human right builds on our shared humanity. These rights are not derived from the citizenship of any country, or the membership of any nation, but are presumed to be claims or entitlements of every human being. They differ, therefore, from constitutionally created rights guaranteed for specific people.

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.

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.

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.

Education makes human beings more articulate. It transforms people. You can think differently about the world. It makes it possible for you to get jobs. It makes a dramatic difference. It generates a social equity that we need.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Education makes us the human beings we are. It has major impacts on economic development, on social equity, gender equity. In all kinds of ways, our lives are transformed by education and security. Even if it had not one iota of effect [on] security, it would still remain in my judgment the biggest priority in the world.

Empowering women is key to building a future we want

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty

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.

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

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.

The Arab world is also the world that produced some of the greatest improvements in mathematics and in science. Even today, when a Princeton mathematician does an algorithm, he may not remember that "algorithm" derived from the name al-Khwarizmi, who is a ninth-century Arab mathematician.

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

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

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.

Any classification according to a singular identity polarizes people in a particular way, but if we take note of the fact that we have many different identities - related not just to religion but also to language, occupation and business, politics, class and poverty, and many others - we can see that the polarization of one can be resisted by a fuller picture. So knowledge and understanding are extremely important to fight against singular polarization.

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.