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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
Health
Obsession
Aimed
Came
Practicals
Award
Opportunity
Practical
Nobel
Also
Gender
Specifically
Care
Basic
Equity
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India
Literacy
Way
Including
Immediate
Bangladesh

More quotes by Amartya Sen

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The higher education has always appealed to the South Asian social leaders across all the countries in South Asia. But primary education has been neglected. The oddity, by the way, is if you look at the contrast in India, there are some areas like Kerala where there's a long history of educational development.
Amartya Sen
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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
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It was incredible to me that members of one community could kill members of another not for anything personal that they did but simply based on their identity.
Amartya Sen
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If a theory of justice is to guide reasoned choice of policies, strategies or institutions, then the identification of fully just social arrangements is neither necessary nor sufficient.
Amartya Sen
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Ultimately, imperialism made even the British working classes suffer. This is a point which the British working classes found quite difficult to swallow, but they did, actually.
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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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.
Amartya Sen
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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.
Amartya Sen
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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
Amartya Sen
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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.
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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Progress is more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulent
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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Opponents of globalisation may see it as a new folly, but it is neither particularly new, nor, in general, a folly.
Amartya Sen
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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
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If the knowledge of torture of others makes you sick, it is a case of sympathy... It can be argued that behaviour based on sympathy is in an important sense egoistic, for one is oneself pleased at others' pleasure and pained at others' pain, and the pursuit of one's own utility may thus be helped by sympathetic action.
Amartya Sen
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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.
Amartya Sen
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Being able to read, write, do your sums really transforms a human being.
Amartya Sen
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There are few subjects that match the social significance of women's education in the contemporary world.
Amartya Sen
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Nearly everywhere Buddhism went, there had been a higher level of literacy, even in miserable Burma, not to mention Thailand and Sri Lanka.
Amartya Sen