Quote

The success of a society is to be evaluated primarily by the freedoms that members of the society enjoy.

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
Enjoy
Evaluated
Freedoms
Primarily
Members
Society
Success

More quotes by 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
Education could be a great vehicle for gender equity. It allows people to see what your rights are by reading. Quite often women, for example, may have rights that they are not in the position to actually make use of.
Amartya Sen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty
Amartya Sen
Image
I'm very skeptical of the amount of money that goes into military expenditure, not just in the poor countries [but] also in the rich. I think it's one of the most massive wastes in the world, but education is [at the] other end. It's the bearer of the greatest fruits that mankind has ever known.
Amartya Sen
Image
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
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
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
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
Image
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
Image
the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute
Amartya Sen
Image
From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.
Amartya Sen
Image
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
Image
I believe that virtually all the problems in the world come from inequality of one kind or another.
Amartya Sen
Image
[The] USA has been immensely successful in making the determination to deal with terrorism [as] a factor in the global world and, similarly, if it took a similar interest in education, it could make a difference.
Amartya Sen
Image
Progress is more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulent
Amartya Sen
Image
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.
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
Economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable - and unethical.
Amartya Sen