Amartya Sen Capabilities Quotes

Opportunity could be defined in so many ways. There's one way of defining it, equality of opportunity, which is in fact the equality of capability, but the libertarians got there first and they have - like the Americans getting onto the moon, naming every crater after something like an astronaut - they have got there and named "opportunity" in a way that we cannot get ownership of now. ~ Amartya Sen

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. ~ Amartya Sen

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

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
~ Amartya Sen

The World Bank has not invariably been my favorite organization. The power to do good goes almost always with the possibility to do the opposite, and as a professional economist, I have had occasions in the past to wonder whther the Bank could not have done very much better. ~ Amartya Sen

I was told Indian women don't think like that about equality. But I would like to argue that if they don't think like that they should be given a real opportunity to think like that. ~ Amartya Sen

To say that the whole of the industrial experience of Europe and America just shows the rewards of exploiting the Third World is a gross simplification. ~ Amartya Sen

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

The lack of economic freedom could be a very major reason for loss of liberty, liberty of life. ~ Amartya Sen

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. ~ Amartya Sen

It's very easy to capture pictures of jubilant people in the street after the nuclear bomb. But there were no pictures of morose people sitting in their kitchens and living rooms. ~ Amartya Sen

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. ~ Amartya Sen

We might have reason to be driven! We live for a short stretch of time in a world we share with others. Virtually everything we do is dependent on others, from the arts and culture to farmers who grow the food we eat. ~ Amartya Sen

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

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

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. ~ Amartya Sen

While we cannot live without history, we need not live within it either. ~ Amartya Sen

To say that certainly America was very lucky to get a large amount of land, and the native Indians were extremely unlucky to have white men coming over here, is one thing. But to say that the whole of the American prosperity was based on exploiting the indigenous population would be a great mistake. ~ Amartya Sen

No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. ~ Amartya Sen

Resenting the obtuseness of others is not good ground for shooting oneself in the foot. ~ Amartya Sen

I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another. ~ Amartya Sen

Hardly any famine affects more than 5 percent, almost never more than 10 percent, of the population. The largest proportion of a population affected was the Irish famine of the 1840s, which came close to 10 percent over a number of years. ~ Amartya Sen

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. ~ Amartya Sen

The themes that the anti-globalization protesters bring to the discussion are of extraordinary importance. However, the theses that they often bring to it, sometimes in the form of slogans, are often oversimple. ~ Amartya Sen

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

I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970. ~ Amartya Sen

It was incredible to me that members of one community could kill members of another not for anything personal that they did but simply based on their identity. ~ Amartya Sen

The powerful effect of female literacy contrasts with the comparatively ineffective roles of, say, male literacy or general poverty reduction as instruments of child mortality reduction. The increase in male literacy over the same range (from 22 to 75 percent) only reduces under-five mortality from 169 per thousand to 141 per thousand. And a 50 percent reduction in the incidence of poverty (from the actual 1981 level) only reduces the predicted value of under-five mortality from 156 per thousand to 153 per thousand.

Here again, the message seems to be that some variables relating to women's agency (in this case, female literacy) often play a much more important role in promoting social well-being (in particular, child survival) than variables relating to the general level of opulence in the society. These findings have important practical implications. Both types of variables can be influenced through public action, but respectively require rather different forms of public intervention. ~ Amartya Sen

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

Development cannot really be so centered only on those in power. ~ Amartya Sen

I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics. ~ 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. ~ Amartya Sen

[Globalization] has enriched the world scientifically and culturally and benefited many people economically as well. ~ Amartya Sen

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

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