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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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Amartya Sen
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: November 3
Economist
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Shantiniketan
Amartya Kumar Sen
Professor Amartya Kumar Sen
Half
Famines
Government
Famine
Prevent
Governments
Easily
Question
Stop
Effort

More quotes by 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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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.
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From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.
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I think that so many of our abilities to do things depend on interaction with each other.
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[To organize a school] looks much more difficult in theory than it does in practice.
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I believe that virtually all the problems in the world come from inequality of one kind or another.
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].
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Human life depends not only on income but also on social opportunities, [for example] what the state does for educating.
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Empowering women is key to building a future we want
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I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Globalization is a complex issue, partly because economic globalization is only one part of it. Globalization is greater global closeness, and that is cultural, social, political, as well as economic.
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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.
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A defeated argument that refuses to be obliterated can remain very alive.
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There are Muslims of all kinds. The idea of closing them into a single identity is wrong.
Amartya Sen
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I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.
Amartya Sen
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The fact that schools can actually be a major factor in cementing the world is a factor that's worth considering, the fact that we all have a shared human identity in addition to many other identities.
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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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