Quote

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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Amartya Sen
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: November 3
Economist
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Shantiniketan
Amartya Kumar Sen
Professor Amartya Kumar Sen
People
Starvation
Characteristic
Characteristics
Food
Enough

More quotes by Amartya Sen

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If the government is vulnerable to public opinion, then famines are a dreadfully bad thing to have. You can’t win many elections after a famine, and you don’t like being criticized by newspapers, opposition parties in parliament, and so on. Democracy gives the government an immediate political incentive to act.
Amartya Sen
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Capability is just a concept of what is it we're looking at. Now how far we can go along that and what new capabilities become possible is something we have to judge.
Amartya Sen
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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
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I was told Indian women don't think like that about equality. But I would like to argue that if they don't think like that they should be given a real opportunity to think like that.
Amartya Sen
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Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty
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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Development cannot really be so centered only on those in power.
Amartya Sen
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Economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable - and unethical.
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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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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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.
Amartya Sen
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Imparting education not only enlightens the receiver, but also broadens the giver - the teachers, the parents, the friends.
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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Gender inequality is not one problem, it's a collection of problems.
Amartya Sen
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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
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The best hope for peace in the world lies in the simple but far-reaching recognition that we all have many different associations and affiliations, and we need not see ourselves as being rigidly divided by a single categorization of hardened groups, which confront each other.
Amartya Sen
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There's absolutely no reason why at the level of basic schooling that there should be any inequity whatsoever. And [that's] the first direction to go, [but] that need not prevent you from doing all the other equalities that you want.
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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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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The Arab world is also the world that produced some of the greatest improvements in mathematics and in science. Even today, when a Princeton mathematician does an algorithm, he may not remember that algorithm derived from the name al-Khwarizmi, who is a ninth-century Arab mathematician.
Amartya Sen