Amartya Sen quotes:

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Empowering women is key to building a future we want

There is considerable evidence that women's education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children

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.

The best hope for peace in the world lies in the simple but far-reaching recognition that we all have many different associations and affiliations, and we need not see ourselves as being rigidly divided by a single categorization of hardened groups, which confront each other.

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

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.

Opponents of globalisation may see it as a new folly, but it is neither particularly new, nor, in general, a folly.

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.

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

While we cannot live without history, we need not live within it either.

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

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.

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

An epistemic methodology that sees the pursuit of knowledge as entirely congruent with the search for power is a great deal more cunning than wise. It can needlessly undermine the value of knowledge in satisfying curiosity and interest; it significantly weakens one of the profound characteristics of human beings.

There are few subjects that match the social significance of women's education in the contemporary world.

I have not had any serious non-academic job.

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.

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

Nilai Kemanusiaan kita ditantang secara kasar manakala keragaman di antara kita dipampatkan secara semena-mena ke dalam satu sistem kategorisasi tunggal yang semena-mena

Kita akan sanggup mengubah suatu kebudayaan dengan cara memberikan para perempuan anak bangsa alat yang tepat untuk tumbuh terdidik agar mereka dapat menolong diri sendiri. (Amartya Sen)

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

I believe that virtually all the problems in the world come from inequality of one kind or another.

The success of a society is to be evaluated primarily by the freedoms that members of the society enjoy.

Poverty is the deprivation of opportunity.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Democracy is a universal value

No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.

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

Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

A defeated argument that refuses to be obliterated can remain very alive.

Globalization is a complex issue, partly because economic globalization is only one part of it. Globalization is greater global closeness, and that is cultural, social, political, as well as economic.

But once we recognize that many ideas that are taken to be quintessentially Western have also flourished in other civilizations, we also see that these ideas are not as culture-specific as is sometimes claimed. We need not begin with pessimism, at least on this ground, about the prospects of reasoned humanism in the world.

The exchange between different cultures can not possibly be seen as a threat, when it is friendly. But I believe that the dissatisfaction with the overall architecture often depends on the quality of leadership.

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.

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

The governments and the hard-headed military establishment and the general conservative part of America have never taken much interest in democracy, anyway.

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.

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.

We might have reason to be driven! We live for a short stretch of time in a world we share with others. Virtually everything we do is dependent on others, from the arts and culture to farmers who grow the food we eat.

The opportunities, income, schools facilities, the basic income support that the government provides or any of these things .. public transport arrangements we have.. all these are part of the way our lives and freedoms are effected.

Resenting the obtuseness of others is not good ground for shooting oneself in the foot.

I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.

If the knowledge of torture of others makes you sick, it is a case of sympathy... It can be argued that behaviour based on sympathy is in an important sense egoistic, for one is oneself pleased at others' pleasure and pained at others' pain, and the pursuit of one's own utility may thus be helped by sympathetic action.

I donÂ?t think that India is much celebrated for its democracy. Democracy has been a very neglected commodity at home and abroad.

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.

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 certainly America was very lucky to get a large amount of land, and the native Indians were extremely unlucky to have white men coming over here, is one thing. But to say that the whole of the American prosperity was based on exploiting the indigenous population would be a great mistake.

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.

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.

Hardly any famine affects more than 5 percent, almost never more than 10 percent, of the population. The largest proportion of a population affected was the Irish famine of the 1840s, which came close to 10 percent over a number of years.

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.

Even though IÂ?m pro-globalization, I have to say thank God for the anti-globalization movement. TheyÂ?re putting important issues on the agenda.

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.

[N]o democracy with a free press has ever experienced a major famine.

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.

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.

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.

I attempted to see famines as broad "economic" problems (concentrating on how people can buy food, or otherwise get entitled to it), rather than in terms of the grossly undifferentiated picture of aggregate food supply for the economy as a whole.

I was told Indian women don't think like that about equality. But I would like to argue that if they don't think like that they should be given a real opportunity to think like that.