Amartya Sen Quotes

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

— Amartya Sen

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

— Amartya Sen

“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

Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence ... they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press. ... a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have

— Amartya Sen

“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

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

Hindutava's nationalism ignores the rationalist traditions of India, a country in which some of the earliest steps in algebra, geometry, and astronomy were taken, where the decimal system emerged, where early philosophy - secular as well as religious - achieved exceptional sophistication, where people invented games like chess, pioneered sex education, and began the first systematic study of political economy. The Hindu militant chooses instead to present India - explicitly or implicitly - as a country of unquestioning idolaters, delirious fanatics, belligerent devotees, and religious murderers

— Amartya Sen

To conclude this discussion, assessment of justice demands engagement with the 'eyes of mankind',
first, because we may variously identify with the others elsewhere and not just with our local community;
second, because our choices and actions may affect the lives of others far as well as near;
and third,because what they see from their respective perspective of history and geography may help us to overcome our own parochialism.

— Amartya Sen

“I have not had any serious non-academic job.”

— Amartya Sen

“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

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

“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

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

— Amartya Sen

“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

“Empowering women is key to building a future we want”

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

“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.”

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

“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

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

— Amartya Sen

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.

— Amartya Sen

“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

“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

“One has to be realistic. OneÂ’s concern for equity and justice in the world must not carry one into the alien territory of unreasoned belief. ThatÂ’s very important.”

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

“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

“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

“ItÂ’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

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

— Amartya Sen

Democracy is a universal value

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

“We live in a world community, and economic contact has partly contributed to that. ItÂ’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

“ItÂ’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

“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

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

“Globalization can be very unjust and unfair and unequal, but these are matters under our control. ItÂ’s not that we donÂ’t need the market economy. We need it. But the market economy should not have priority or dominance over other institutions.”

— Amartya Sen

“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

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

— Amartya Sen

“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

“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

“There are some people who say that theyÂ’re concerned only with poverty but not inequality. But I donÂ’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.”

— Amartya Sen

“When I was giving a lecture in India, the capabilities that I have to be concerned with there, namely the ability of people to go to a school, to be literate, to be able to have a basic health care everywhere, to be able to seek some kind of medical response to one's ailment; these become central issues in the Indian context which they're not in the UK, because you're well beyond that.”

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

“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