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I think in those countries, including my own in India, where I think primary education has been badly neglected by successive governments, I blame the opposition as much. Why have they allowed the government to get away with it?

Amartya Sen

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Amartya Sen
Age: 90
Born: 1933
Born: November 3
Economist
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Shantiniketan
Amartya Kumar Sen
Professor Amartya Kumar Sen
Including
Primaries
Education
Primary
Away
Governments
Government
Opposition
Country
Allowed
Much
Countries
Successive
Think
Blame
Neglected
Thinking
India
Badly

More quotes by Amartya Sen

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We need to ask the moral questions: Do I have a right to be rich? And do I have a right to be content living in a world with so much poverty and inequality? These questions motivate us to view the issue of inequality as central to human living.
Amartya Sen
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Empowering women is key to building a future we want
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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Even though I’m pro-globalization, I have to say thank God for the anti-globalization movement. They’re putting important issues on the agenda.
Amartya Sen
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The anti-globalization movement is one of the biggest globalized events of the contemporary world, people coming from everywhere, —Australia, Indonesia, Britain, India, Poland, Germany, South Africa—to demonstrate in Seattle or Quebec. What could be more global than that?
Amartya Sen
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Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty
Amartya Sen
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Resenting the obtuseness of others is not good ground for shooting oneself in the foot.
Amartya Sen
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Thailand's economic development was driven by educational expansion. That has been a very dramatic factor, and South Asia had been pretty miserable in not learning from that experience.
Amartya Sen
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There is considerable evidence that women's education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children
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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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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I have not had any serious non-academic job.
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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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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The exchange between different cultures can not possibly be seen as a threat, when it is friendly. But I believe that the dissatisfaction with the overall architecture often depends on the quality of leadership.
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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Human life consists of doing certain things ... to take part in the life of the community to be able to talk about subjects that interest me and there freedom of speech comes into it.
Amartya Sen
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When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh.
Amartya Sen
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Famines occur under a colonial administration, like the British Raj in India or for that matter in Ireland, or under military dictators in one country after another, like Somalia and Ethiopia, or in one-party states like the Soviet Union and China.
Amartya Sen
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If you're dealing with grappling [with] problems of feeding people, the biggest impact in fertility reduction is girls' schools. Schooled girls make a bigger impact on that than any other factor - not these various regulations [such as] you have to have one child or that. It turns out that none of these are effective.
Amartya Sen