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I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.

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
Philosophy
Politics
Instinctively
Hostile
Remain

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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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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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
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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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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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We live in a world where there is a need for pluralistic institutions and for recognizing different types of freedom, economic, social, cultural, and political, which are interrelated.
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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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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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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I think gender inequality is a problem that goes back a long, long time. In human society, as a whole, women have tended to have a kind of inferior position - very often combined with playing up women as great role [models].
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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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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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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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
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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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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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No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.
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
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The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.
Amartya Sen
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Belonging to humanity is a great thing for us, and I think the schools can do it. So I think we can look after the quality of education on the school even as we expand the availability of schooling.
Amartya Sen