Quotes from Amartya Sen

Empowering women is key to building a future we want

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

There are few subjects that match the social significance of women's education in the contemporary world.

The curriculum of the school did not neglect India's cultural, analytical and scientific heritage, but was very involved also with the rest of the world.

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

It is also very engaging - and a delight - to go back to Bangladesh as often as I can, which is not only my old home, but also where some of my closest friends and collaborators live and work.

From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.

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

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

The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.

I really do believe that education, despite this massive potential in transforming human lives, has not received the kind of attention that people should have given to it.

Your voice is much more articulate and people listen to you if you've been to school. In family decisions, not surprisingly, the biggest impact in reducing fertility is girls' education.

If jobs are important, education is important.

I think education has a bigger impact on the lives of people than absolutely anything else.

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.

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.

Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty

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.