Quotes from Amartya Sen

People's identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way - quite suddenly - to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities.

Poverty is not just a lack of money; it is not having the capability to realize one's full potential as a human being

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

I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.

Even though IÂ'm pro-globalization, I have to say thank God for the anti-globalization movement. TheyÂ're putting important issues on the agenda.

The governments and the hard-headed military establishment and the general conservative part of America have never taken much interest in democracy, anyway.

No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.

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

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.

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.

But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.

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.

To conclude this discussion, assessment of justice demands engagement with the 'eyes of mankind', first, because we may variously identify with the others elsewhere and not just with our local community; second, because our choices and actions may affect the lives of others far as well as near; and third,because what they see from their respective perspective of history and geography may help us to overcome our own parochialism.

there are two principal approaches to secularism, focusing respectively on (1) neutrality between different religions, and (2) prohibition of religious associations in state activities.

The Affluent Society not only changed the way the country viewed itself, but gave new phrases to the language: Conventional wisdom, the bland leading the bland, private opulence and public squalor.

The case for doing what one sees as one's duty must be strong, but how can we be indifferent to the consequences that may follow from our doing what we take to be our just duty?

In my view the imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education. Caste divisions, religious conflicts, aversion to work, precarious economic conditions – all centre on this single factor.

He wrote extensively on how schools should be made more attractive to boys and girls and thus more productive. His own co-educational school at Santiniketan had many progressive features. The emphasis here was on self-motivation rather than on discipline, and on fostering intellectual curiosity rather than competitive excellence.

Important as history is, reasoning has to go beyond the past.

So the much criticized food subsidy and employment guarantee for the poor and the unemployed cost about 1.14 per cent of GDP, whereas the cost of subsidizing electricity, fuel and fertilizers for the relatively better off is minimally 2.63 per cent, more than twice what is allocated to feed the poor and provide employment to the unemployed.

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

It is also interesting to note that the greatest grammarian in Sanskrit (indeed possibly in any language), namely P??ini, who systematized and transformed Sanskrit grammar and phonetics around the fourth century BCE, was of Afghan origin (he describes his village on the banks of the river Kabul).

It is not often realized that even the word 'Mandarin', standing as it does for a central concept in Chinese culture, is derived from a Sanskrit word, Mantr?, which went from India to China via Malaya.

Silence is a powerful enemy of social justice.