Amartya Sen Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

Empowering women is key to building a future we want

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

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.

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.

Education makes us the human beings we are. It has major impacts on economic development, on social equity, gender equity. In all kinds of ways, our lives are transformed by education and security. Even if it had not one iota of effect [on] security, it would still remain in my judgment the biggest priority in the world.

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.

Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The increasing tendency towards seeing people in terms of one dominant ‘identity’ (‘this is your duty as an American’, ‘you must commit these acts as a Muslim’, or ‘as a Chinese you should give priority to this national engagement’) is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups (to all of which he or she belongs).

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 and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have.

I really do believe that education, despite this massive potential in transforming human lives, has not received the kind of attention that people should have given to it.

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

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.

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.

Gender inequality is not one problem, it's a collection of problems.

There’s a clear and strong connection between fertility reduction and women’s literacy and empowerment, including women’s gainful employment. If you look at the more than 300 districts of India, the strongest influences in explaining fertility variations are women’s literacy and gainful economic employment.

Each human being is a citizen of the world. We have many identities, of which one of the identities is our human identity. And that's something that the schools can provide, but that requires again a vision rather than being centers of hatred. It could be an enormous opportunity to give that mission.

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.

Education could be a great vehicle for gender equity. It allows people to see what your rights are by reading. Quite often women, for example, may have rights that they are not in the position to actually make use of.

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

There are some people who say that they’re concerned only with poverty but not inequality. But I don’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.

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

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.

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.

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 Arab world is also the world that produced some of the greatest improvements in mathematics and in science. Even today, when a Princeton mathematician does an algorithm, he may not remember that "algorithm" derived from the name al-Khwarizmi, who is a ninth-century Arab mathematician.