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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
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Awards
Obsessions
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Obsession
Aimed
Came
Practicals
Award
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Practical
Nobel
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Gender
Specifically
Care
Basic
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India
Literacy
Way
Including
Immediate
Bangladesh

More quotes by Amartya Sen

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Democracy is a universal value
Amartya Sen
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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.
Amartya Sen
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In absolutely every way, our lives are transformed by education and basic education in particular. So I would have thought that in any kind of system, to say that the priorities don't include education is a mistake, whether it's [at the] domestic level or at the global level.
Amartya Sen
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No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.
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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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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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.
Amartya Sen
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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.
Amartya Sen
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If jobs are important, education is important.
Amartya Sen
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From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.
Amartya Sen
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Economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable - and unethical.
Amartya Sen
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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
Amartya Sen
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A defeated argument that refuses to be obliterated can remain very alive.
Amartya Sen
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You can’t prevent undernourishment so easily, but famines you can stop with half an effort. Then the question was why don’t the governments stop them?
Amartya Sen
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I think the UN's role - especially since it's not an extremely rich fund, and that's to put it mildly - is mainly to act as a leading thinker of the world in terms of how to think about the future.
Amartya Sen
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I have not had any serious non-academic job.
Amartya Sen
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There are Muslims of all kinds. The idea of closing them into a single identity is wrong.
Amartya Sen
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But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.
Amartya Sen
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Resenting the obtuseness of others is not good ground for shooting oneself in the foot.
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