Arthur Lewis Quotes

My father died when I was seven, leaving a widow and five sons, ranging in age from five to seventeen. My mother was the most highly-disciplined and hardest working person I have ever known, and this, combined with her love and gentleness, enabled her to make a success of each of her children.

— Arthur Lewis

“Trade allegedly does not foster growth because when it begins, a flood of imports of factory origin destroys the handicraft manufacturing of the less developed country: the models for this are the effects of British exports of textiles and of iron in India and Chile in the first half of the nineteenth century.”

— Arthur Lewis

“We cannot give our students all that they expect, whether by way of the quality of their schooling or by way of the jobs that they were hoping to get. Student frustration is a worldwide phenomenon, pushing our societies into adjusting faster than they are used to.”

— Arthur Lewis

“I was born in St. Lucia on January 23, 1915. My parents, who were both school teachers, had immigrated there from Antigua about a dozen years before.”

— Arthur Lewis

“The subsistence level is only a conventional idea, and conventions change.”

— Arthur Lewis

We need no elaborate statistical proof that trade depends on prosperity in the industrial countries.

— Arthur Lewis

“When the developed grow fast, the developing grow fast, and when the developed slow down, the developing slow down.”

— Arthur Lewis

Education is the great growth industry of the Third World. Since the Second World War, we have multiplied the number of children in school by four, with even larger multiples for secondary and university education.

— Arthur Lewis

“In 1938, I was given a one-year teaching appointment, which was sensational for British universities. This was converted into the usual four-year contract for an Assistant Lecturer in 1939.”

— Arthur Lewis

“Science affects all our ways of thinking about the world: both the physical world, which, if I may make so bold, is easy to understand because it is regular and follows simple laws, and also the social world, which is more baffling and less predictable.”

— Arthur Lewis

The strength of the scientific establishment in any country is related to its general level of education, not only in supplying large numbers of eager minds for further training, but also in ensuring a public opinion that holds science in esteem and approves financial support.

— Arthur Lewis

“Two conditions of self-sustaining growth are that a country has acquired a cadre of domestic entrepreneurs and administrators and, secondly, that it has attained to adequate savings and taxable capacity.”

— Arthur Lewis

“When I was seven, I had to stay home for several weeks because of some ailment, whereupon my father elected to teach me so that I should not fall behind. In fact, he taught me in three months as much as the school taught in two years, so, on returning to school, I was shifted from grade 4 to grade 6.”

— Arthur Lewis