Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
I believe that virtually all the problems in the world come from inequality of one kind or another.
Amartya Sen
Image
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.
Amartya Sen
Image
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
Image
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.
Amartya Sen
Image
The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.
Amartya Sen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It seems to me to be kind of inescapable that one has to be interested in the issue of gender and gender equality. I don’t really expect any credit for going in that direction. It’s the only natural direction to go in. Why is it that some people don’t see that as so patently obvious as it should be?
Amartya Sen
Image
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
Image
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.
Amartya Sen
Image
I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.
Amartya Sen
Image
One has to be realistic. One’s concern for equity and justice in the world must not carry one into the alien territory of unreasoned belief. That’s very important.
Amartya Sen
Image
Resenting the obtuseness of others is not good ground for shooting oneself in the foot.
Amartya Sen
Image
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
Image
No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.
Amartya Sen
Image
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.
Amartya Sen
Image
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
Image
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.
Amartya Sen
Image
No substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic country - no matter how poor.
Amartya Sen
Image
Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty
Amartya Sen