Amartya Sen Quotes - Page 2

There are Muslims of all kinds. The idea of closing them into a single identity is wrong.

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.

Anything that increases the voice of young women tends therefore to reduce the fertility rate.

I think that so many of our abilities to do things depend on interaction with each other.

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.

The identity of just one thing, the "clash of civilization" view that you're a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Christian, I think that's such a limited way of seeing humanity, and schools have the opportunity to bring out the fact that we have hundreds of identities. We have our national identity. We have our cultural identity, linguistic identity, religious identity. Yes, cultural identity, professional identity, all kinds of ways.

Being able to read, write, do your sums really transforms a human being.

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.

Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror.

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.

Human life depends not only on income but also on social opportunities, [for example] what the state does for educating.

we must go on fighting for basic education for all, but also emphasize the importance of the content of education. We have to make sure that sectarian schooling does not convert education into a prison, rather than being a passport to the wide world.

Each human being is a citizen of the world. We have many identities, of which one of the identities is our human identity. And that's something that the schools can provide, but that requires again a vision rather than being centers of hatred. It could be an enormous opportunity to give that mission.

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.

the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty

While I am interested both in economics and in philosophy, the union of my interests in the two fields far exceeds their intersection.

Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence... they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and... a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have.

If jobs are important, education is important.

Democracy is a universal value

Poverty is not really as much of an obstacle to educational expansion as it's sometimes made out to be.

There is considerable evidence that women's education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children

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.

A defeated argument that refuses to be obliterated can remain very alive.