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One has to be realistic. One’s concern for equity and justice in the world must not carry one into the alien territory of unreasoned belief. That’s very important.

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
Concern
Justice
Belief
Equity
Must
Alien
Important
Aliens
World
Realistic
Territory
Carry

More quotes by 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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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.
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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From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.
Amartya Sen
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Development requires major source of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states.
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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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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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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Human development, as an approach, is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it.
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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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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In all kinds of ways there are different freedoms that effect our lives and you can assess what our lives are like by looking at the various freedoms that we have.
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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I think that so many of our abilities to do things depend on interaction with each other.
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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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.
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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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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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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The success of a society is to be evaluated primarily by the freedoms that members of the society enjoy.
Amartya Sen