Amartya Sen

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

— 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

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

To say that the whole of the industrial experience of Europe and America just shows the rewards of exploiting the Third World…

— Amartya Sen

When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old…

— Amartya Sen

It was incredible to me that members of one community could kill members of another not for anything personal that they did…

— Amartya Sen

I guess some of the most delightful moments of my teenage years were when I was trying not just to educate myself…

— Amartya Sen

Education makes human beings more articulate. It transforms people. You can think differently about the world. It makes it possible for you…

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

When the government is trying to penny-pinch and, at the same time, trying to keep a defense expenditure and so forth, which…

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

“In my view the imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the…

— Amartya Sen

we must go on fighting for basic education for all, but also emphasize the importance of the content of education. We have…

— Amartya Sen

There's no reason why one need not look at the content of education just as one is expanding the availability of school,…

— Amartya Sen

Japan became an imperialist country in many ways, but that was much later, after it had already made big progress. I don’t…

— Amartya Sen

Virtually everything we do is dependent on others, from the arts and culture to farmers who grow the food we eat. Quite…

— Amartya Sen

Each human being is a citizen of the world. We have many identities, of which one of the identities is our human…

— 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…

— Amartya Sen

“I consider the three years I spent in Santiniketan as the most fruitful of my life…. Santiniketan opened my eyes for the…

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty

— Amartya Sen

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen