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Democracy is a universal value

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
Universal
Value
Democracy
Values

More quotes by Amartya Sen

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You can’t prevent undernourishment so easily, but famines you can stop with half an effort. Then the question was why don’t the governments stop them?
Amartya Sen
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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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Japan became an imperialist country in many ways, but that was much later, after it had already made big progress. I don’t think Japan’s wealth was based on exploiting China. Japan’s wealth was based on its expansion in international trade.
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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.
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I think education has a bigger impact on the lives of people than absolutely anything else.
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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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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[N]o democracy with a free press has ever experienced a major famine.
Amartya Sen
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I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.
Amartya Sen
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To say that certainly America was very lucky to get a large amount of land, and the native Indians were extremely unlucky to have white men coming over here, is one thing. But to say that the whole of the American prosperity was based on exploiting the indigenous population would be a great mistake.
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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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
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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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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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Education can really transform the insecurities in the world into a bigger vision of what we are as human beings.
Amartya Sen
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But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.
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 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
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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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There are few subjects that match the social significance of women's education in the contemporary world.
Amartya Sen