Amartya Sen
But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.Collection: Teacher
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.
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.
While I am interested both in economics and in philosophy, the union of my interests in the two fields far exceeds their intersection.
The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.
I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.
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.
I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970.
I have not had any serious non-academic job.
From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.
Poverty is not just a lack of money; it is not having the capability to realize one's full potential as a human beingCollection: Poverty
Economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable - and unethical.Collection: Growth
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.Collection: Ideas
I believe that virtually all the problems in the world come from inequality of one kind or another.Collection: Believe
Poverty is the deprivation of opportunity.Collection: Opportunity
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.Collection: Impact
The success of a society is to be evaluated primarily by the freedoms that members of the society enjoy.Collection: Members
Empowering women is key to building a future we wantCollection: Keys
Education can really transform the insecurities in the world into a bigger vision of what we are as human beings.Collection: Insecurity
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.Collection: People
Imparting education not only enlightens the receiver, but also broadens the giver - the teachers, the parents, the friends.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Views
Gender inequality is not one problem, it's a collection of problems.Collection: Problem
Freedoms are not only the primary ends of development, they are also among its principal means.Collection: Mean
No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.Collection: Taken
Education makes human beings more articulate. It transforms people. You can think differently about the world. It makes it possible for you to get jobs. It makes a dramatic difference. It generates a social equity that we need.Collection: Jobs
I think education has a bigger impact on the lives of people than absolutely anything else.Collection: Thinking
Progress is more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulentCollection: Progress
Globalization can be very unjust and unfair and unequal, but these are matters under our control. Its not that we dont need the market economy. We need it. But the market economy should not have priority or dominance over other institutions.Collection: Priorities
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.Collection: Knowledge
Development cannot really be so centered only on those in power.Collection: Development
Being able to read, write, do your sums really transforms a human being.Collection: Writing
Human ordeals thrive on ignorance. To understand a problem with clarity is already half way towards solving it.Collection: Ignorance
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.Collection: Challenges
The lack of economic freedom could be a very major reason for loss of liberty, liberty of life.Collection: Loss
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.Collection: Sometimes
There's no reason why one need not look at the content of education just as one is expanding the availability of school, because it doesn't cost more money to get them [a] better education. It requires better textbooks, it requires a vision, it requires a determination, but it's not very expensive to do that anyway.Collection: Determination
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.Collection: Community
I think in those countries, including my own in India, where I think primary education has been badly neglected by successive governments, I blame the opposition as much. Why have they allowed the government to get away with it?Collection: Country
Nearly everywhere Buddhism went, there had been a higher level of literacy, even in miserable Burma, not to mention Thailand and Sri Lanka.Collection: Buddhism
I think East Asian countries, I think they're very fortunate to have Buddhism survive as a strong influence because right from the time when Buddha himself, 2,500 years ago, made the point about the importance of education, and the word "Buddha" also means enlighten[ed] or educated. So all the Buddhist countries, not only Japan and Korea and China and Hong Kong and Thailand but also even Burma and Sri Lanka, had a higher level of education.Collection: Country
When the government is trying to penny-pinch and, at the same time, trying to keep a defense expenditure and so forth, which are regarded as quote unquote essential, the education is regarded inessential.Collection: Government
You cant prevent undernourishment so easily, but famines you can stop with half an effort. Then the question was why dont the governments stop them?Collection: Government
Women's education has a much greater impact [on], for example, fertility. Men's education, if our studies are correct, ha[s] almost no impact on fertility. Women's do. So, by the way, as a man, it's not to the glory of men specifically that it's women's education that reduces child mortality.Collection: Children
One has to bring the multidimensional impact that schooling makes in the lives of people. There's nothing like it, and I think the importance of it has to be shaken into people's understanding and determination.Collection: Determination
Women had always been thought of as looking after the family when men go and earn an income and they're the bread earner and so on. So there is a kind of generation of inequality, [and], on top of the fact, women have pregnancies and periods, [and] when the children are very small, there are greater demands on their time. So one way or another women have had a pretty rough deal in the past, and there's no reason why that should continue, and any country that has tried to remedy that has succeeded in doing so.Collection: Country
I guess some of the most delightful moments of my teenage years were when I was trying not just to educate myself but trying to educate others. And I could see how the lives of children could be transformed in that.Collection: Children
In India, [in] the great documents like [the] Upanishads in eighth century B.C., you find some of the wisest [women] making great, learned speeches and then you worship them, but actually don't do very much about girls' education generally. So I think there has been a kind of dual presence of pain, respect, and saying you are great, etc., but not providing the basic facilities that make women able to lead the kind of life that they would like to and that men easily do.Collection: Girl
Belonging to humanity is a great thing for us, and I think the schools can do it. So I think we can look after the quality of education on the school even as we expand the availability of schooling.Collection: School