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

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
Enjoy
Evaluated
Freedoms
Primarily
Members
Society
Success

More quotes by Amartya Sen

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I don’t think that India is much celebrated for its democracy. Democracy has been a very neglected commodity at home and abroad.
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I think the whole progress over the last two or three millennia has been entirely dependent on ideas and techniques and commodities and people moving from one part of the world to another. It seems difficult to take an anti-globalization view if one takes globalization properly in its full sense.
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If jobs are important, education is important.
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There are some people who say that they’re concerned only with poverty but not inequality. But I don’t think that is a sustainable thought. A lot of poverty is, in fact, inequality because of the connection between income and capability—having adequate resources to take part in the life of the community.
Amartya Sen
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Development cannot really be so centered only on those in power.
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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I guess some of the most delightful moments of my teenage years were when I was trying not just to educate myself but trying to educate others. And I could see how the lives of children could be transformed in that.
Amartya Sen
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It is also very engaging - and a delight - to go back to Bangladesh as often as I can, which is not only my old home, but also where some of my closest friends and collaborators live and work.
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.
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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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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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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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Even in areas like the most depressed region of India in terms of female education, namely Rajasthan, which has [one of] the lowest female literacy [rates] in India. Even there, 80 to 90 percent of the parents would like their girls to go to school. And indeed, about 80 percent would like them to be made compulsory.
Amartya Sen
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Poverty is a big barrier if you are at the bottom layer of society, don't know where the next meal is coming from. It is not a big barrier of taking the rich with the poor in a big society to provide schooling for all.
Amartya Sen
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It’s scandalous when one thinks about the people who live in a world in which they need not be hungry, in which they need not die without medical care, in which they need not be illiterate, they need not feel hopeless and miserable so much of the time, and yet they are.
Amartya Sen
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Education makes us the human beings we are. It has major impacts on economic development, on social equity, gender equity. In all kinds of ways, our lives are transformed by education and security. Even if it had not one iota of effect [on] security, it would still remain in my judgment the biggest priority in the world.
Amartya Sen
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Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty, which robs people of the freedom to satisfy hunger or to achieve sufficient nutrition, or to obtain remedies for treatable illnesses or the opportunity to be adequatley clothed or sheltered, or to enjoy clean water or sanitary facilities.
Amartya Sen
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China had managed to reduce their fertility to a large extent because of basic expansion of women's education, not because of the one-child family.
Amartya Sen
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Gender inequality is not one problem, it's a collection of problems.
Amartya Sen
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It’s very easy to capture pictures of jubilant people in the street after the nuclear bomb. But there were no pictures of morose people sitting in their kitchens and living rooms.
Amartya Sen