A Quote by Amartya Sen
No substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic country - no matter how poor.
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It only takes one mistake and nothing else you ever do will matter. No matter how hard you work or how smart you become, you'll always be known for that one poor choice.
Has it ever occurred to you, that the rich are at the mercy of the poor, not the poor at that of the rich? Who permits us to be rich if not the poor?
... an essential feature of a decent society, and an almost defining feature of a democratic society, is relative equality of outcome - not opportunity, but outcome. Without that you can't seriously talk about a democratic state... These concepts of the common good have a long life. They lie right at the core of classical liberalism, of Enlightenment thinking... Like Aristotle, [Adam] Smith understood that the common good will require substantial intervention to assure lasting prosperity of the poor by distribution of public revenues.
Mexico is a pretty poor country, but they are maintaining a free, high quality public education system, not for everyone of course but pretty substantial.
The Black Lives Matter movement, the various Occupy movements in Spain and the rest of Europe, in this country, and elsewhere serve as an example of what can be done, and how strong the voices for positive change and truly democratic progress can be.
I am no metaphysician, no philosopher, nay, no saint. But I am poor and I love the poor. I see what they call the poor of this country and how many there are who feel for them!
In my personal opinion, Russia is no less democratic than it used to be. It is a democratic country. It is democratic enough.
It don't matter how many rallies or protests I go to. It don't matter how many songs I make spreading positivity or sending a message. It don't matter how much time I spend within the community. It don't matter that I have a black wife. Being a white person in America, you represent being a benefactor of slavery of what this country was built on.
There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war, or famine, the rich get richer and poor get poorer. The poor even help arrange it.
It's well proved economics that if a country which is rich and a country that is poor come together in global trade, sooner or later the standard of living of the poor country will go up towards that of the rich country.
It doesn't matter where you came from, it doesn't matter how poor you are, it doesn't matter where your family was. It all doesn't matter. You can achieve anything if you have really clear goals and if you work really hard to learn what you need to learn.
It's very un-American to say nice things about elites. Elites are often terrible. It's not like we've ever had a perfect set of benevolent democratic elites ruling over our country. But the fact of the matter is that a representative system of democracy delegates power to elites.
This is not a country that has had a tremendous sympathy for poor people, so I think that the notion that somehow we have slipped into an era in which poor people don't matter is not quite the way our history would define it.
The window of opportunity to avert famine is rapidly closing and could already have closed. The real issue facing us is not whether there will be famine but how many people will actually die.
No theory of government was ever given a fairer test or a more prolonged experiment in a democratic country than democratic socialism received in Britain. Yet it was a miserable failure in every respect... To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukemia with leeches.
Famine is about so much more than food: it is about a famine of education, democracy, health, transport, and so many other items. The food famine becomes a symptom of that vast failure.
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