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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.

Amartya Sen

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Amartya Sen
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: November 3
Economist
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Shantiniketan
Amartya Kumar Sen
Professor Amartya Kumar Sen
Gave
Awards
Obsessions
Health
Obsession
Aimed
Came
Practicals
Award
Opportunity
Practical
Nobel
Also
Gender
Specifically
Care
Basic
Equity
Something
India
Literacy
Way
Including
Immediate
Bangladesh

More quotes by Amartya Sen

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While I am interested both in economics and in philosophy, the union of my interests in the two fields far exceeds their intersection.
Amartya Sen
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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.
Amartya Sen
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Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty
Amartya Sen
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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.
Amartya Sen
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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.
Amartya Sen
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The lack of economic freedom could be a very major reason for loss of liberty, liberty of life.
Amartya Sen
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The governments and the hard-headed military establishment and the general conservative part of America have never taken much interest in democracy, anyway.
Amartya Sen
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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.
Amartya Sen
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Sometimes one makes a distinction between urgency and importance. And while disasters are urgent, the basically most important thing is education. And that's what gives it ultimately urgency too, because unless you do it now, this important thing gets again and again postponed.
Amartya Sen
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[Globalization] has enriched the world scientifically and culturally and benefited many people economically as well.
Amartya Sen
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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.
Amartya Sen
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Even though I’m pro-globalization, I have to say thank God for the anti-globalization movement. They’re putting important issues on the agenda.
Amartya Sen
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I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970.
Amartya Sen
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Freedoms are not only the primary ends of development, they are also among its principal means.
Amartya Sen
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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.
Amartya Sen
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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.
Amartya Sen
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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.
Amartya Sen
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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.
Amartya Sen
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Human ordeals thrive on ignorance. To understand a problem with clarity is already half way towards solving it.
Amartya Sen
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If the government is vulnerable to public opinion, then famines are a dreadfully bad thing to have. You can’t win many elections after a famine, and you don’t like being criticized by newspapers, opposition parties in parliament, and so on. Democracy gives the government an immediate political incentive to act.
Amartya Sen