Amartya Sen Quotes

On being invited to the Jaipur Festival, I was naturally nervous about attempting an opening address to such an elite gathering. ~ Amartya Sen

Human ordeals thrive on ignorance. To understand a problem with clarity is already half way towards solving it. ~ Amartya Sen

The increasing tendency towards seeing people in terms of one dominant 'identity' ('this is your duty as an American', 'you must commit these acts as a Muslim', or 'as a Chinese you should give priority to this national engagement') is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups (to all of which he or she belongs). ~ Amartya Sen

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

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

We live in a world community, and economic contact has partly contributed to that. It's also the case that economic opportunity opened up by economic contact has helped to a great extent to reduce poverty in many parts of the world. ~ 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

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

Ultimately, imperialism made even the British working classes suffer. This is a point which the British working classes found quite difficult to swallow, but they did, actually. ~ 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

One has to be realistic. One's concern for equity and justice in the world must not carry one into the alien territory of unreasoned belief. That's very important. ~ 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

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

Imparting education not only enlightens the receiver, but also broadens the giver - the teachers, the parents, the friends. ~ Amartya Sen

There are some people who say that they're concerned only with poverty but not inequality. But I don't think that is a sustainable thought. A lot of poverty is, in fact, inequality because of the connection between income and capability-having adequate resources to take part in the life of the community. ~ Amartya Sen

Japan became an imperialist country in many ways, but that was much later, after it had already made big progress. I don't think Japan's wealth was based on exploiting China. Japan's wealth was based on its expansion in international trade. ~ 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

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

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

The success of a society is to be evaluated primarily by the freedoms that members of the society enjoy. ~ Amartya Sen

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. ... a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have ~ Amartya Sen

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy - not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side. ~ Eric Hobsbawm

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

In all kinds of ways there are different freedoms that effect our lives and you can assess what our lives are like by looking at the various freedoms that we have. ~ Amartya Sen

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

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

one must go through war to reach peace.4 ~ Amartya Sen

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

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

Unaimed opulence, in general, is a roundabout, undependable, and wasteful way of improving the living standards of the poor. ~ Amartya Sen

You can't prevent undernourishment so easily, but famines you can stop with half an effort. Then the question was why don't the governments stop them? ~ Amartya Sen

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

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

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

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

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

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

The opportunities, income, schools facilities, the basic income support that the government provides or any of these things .. public transport arrangements we have.. all these are part of the way our lives and freedoms are effected. ~ Amartya Sen

Poverty is the deprivation of opportunity. ~ 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

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

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

Ashoka supplemented this general moral and political principle by a dialectical argument based on enlightened self-interest: 'For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own sect, in reality inflicts, by such conduct, the severest injury on his own sect. ~ 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

I'm generally in favor of economic globalization. Having said that, it doesn't always work and does not immediately work in the interest of all. There are sufferers. ~ Amartya Sen

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

To understand the world is never a matter of simply recording our immediate perceptions. Understanding inescapably involves reasoning.
We have to 'read' what we feel and seem to see, and ask what those perceptions indicate and how we may take them into account without being overwhelmed by them. One issue relates to the reliability of our feelings and impressions. A sense of injustice could serve as a signal that moves us, but a signal does demand critical examination, and there has to be some scrutiny of the soundness of a
conclusion based mainly on signals...We also have to ask what kinds of reasoning should count in the assessment of ethical and political concepts such as justice and injustice. ~ 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

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

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

I believe that virtually all the problems in the world come from inequality of one kind or another. ~ Amartya Sen

Opponents of globalisation may see it as a new folly, but it is neither particularly new, nor, in general, a folly. ~ 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

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

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

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

But once we recognize that many ideas that are taken to be quintessentially Western have also flourished in other civilizations, we also see that these ideas are not as culture-specific as is sometimes claimed. We need not begin with pessimism, at least on this ground, about the prospects of reasoned humanism in the world. ~ Amartya Sen

An epistemic methodology that sees the pursuit of knowledge as entirely congruent with the search for power is a great deal more cunning than wise. It can needlessly undermine the value of knowledge in satisfying curiosity and interest; it significantly weakens one of the profound characteristics of human beings. ~ Amartya Sen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any classification according to a singular identity polarizes people in a particular way, but if we take note of the fact that we have many different identities - related not just to religion but also to language, occupation and business, politics, class and poverty, and many others - we can see that the polarization of one can be resisted by a fuller picture. So knowledge and understanding are extremely important to fight against singular polarization. ~ Amartya Sen

Women have tongues of craft, and hearts of guile,
They will, they will not; fools that on them trust;
For in their speech is death, hell in their smile.
[It., Femmina e cosa garrula e fallace:
Vuole e disvuole, e folle uom chi sen fida,
Si tra se volge.] ~ Torquato Tasso

Quelque rigueur qui loge en votre coeur, Amour s'en peut un jour rendre vainqueur. That little harshness which resides in your heart, Love will vanquish someday. ~ Louise Labe

Whenever you think of color you must think of us. ~ Gautam Sen

Not even Sen. [Joseph] McCarthy was able to repress ideas he opposed as effectively as Harvard's hiring committees have suppressed the conservative viewpoints they despise and fear. ~ David Horowitz

Sen. Robert Menendez's Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2010 would try to nullify every single state and local law that fights illegal immigration. Congressman Luis Gutierrez's CIR ASAP Act with over 100 Democratic co-sponsors does the same thing. ~ Russell Pearce

Mitt Romney's losing at this point in a big way. If something's going to come out, get it out in a hurry. I do not know why - given that Mr. Romney knew the day that [Sen. John] McCain lost in 2008 that he was going to run for president again - that he didn't get all of this out and tidy up some of his offshore accounts and all the rest. ~ George Will

Federal laws, including those that made so many people immigrate without documents, gutted the enforcement power of the Department of Labor and created a lower minimum wage for tipped workers than for everybody else, reinforcing the industry's ~ Rinku Sen

In this thatched hut there ought not to be a speck of dust of any kind; both master and visitors are expected to be on terms of absolute sincerity; no ordinary measures of proportion or etiquette or conventionalism are to be followed. ~ Sen No Rikyu

Back then, come July, and the blazers would again make their way out of the steel trunks and evenings would be spent looking at snow-capped mountains from our terrace and spotting the first few lights on the hills above. It was the time for radishes and mulberries in the garden and violets on the slopes. The wind carried with it the comforting fragrance of eucalyptus. It was in fact all about the fragrances, like you know, in a Sherlock Holmes story. Even if you walked with your eyes closed, you could tell at a whiff, when you had arrived at the place, deduce it just by its scent. So, the oranges denoted the start of the fruit-bazaar near Prakash ji's book shop, and the smell of freshly baked plum cake meant you had arrived opposite Air Force school and the burnt lingering aroma of coffee connoted Mayfair. But when they carved a new state out of the land and Dehra was made its capital, we watched besotted as that little town sprouted new buildings, high-rise apartments, restaurant chains, shopping malls and traffic jams, and eventually it spilled over here. I can't help noticing now that the fragrances have changed; the Mogra is tinged with a hint of smoke and will be on the market tomorrow. The Church has remained and so has everything old that was cast in brick and stone, but they seem so much more alien that I almost wish they had been ruined.'
('Left from Dhakeshwari') ~ Kunal Sen

The true object of religion is to bind mankind together, and to bind them all to God. If we see that in the name of religion, men, instead of promoting peace on earth and good-will among men, are trying to show their antagonism and animosity towards each other, then certainly we must stand forward with our voice of protest, and say that religion is defeating its own legitimate object. ~ Keshub Chandra Sen

I shall remain thankful to you for the tenderness of your arms that held me when I wept onto your shoulder, and that held me throughout that winter, after every bicycle accident and every B minus. I discovered Bulbul that you could make everything all right, by blowing softly over scraped knees ... but one such winter day, by which time our childhood heroes had become older men with ordinary problems, I might've confessed to being in love with you and you, in a moment of ruthless propriety, had pretended not to hear.'
('Left from Dhakeshwari') ~ Kunal Sen

For better or worse, when Sen. Inhofe speaks, the Republican Party follows. And when the Republican Party follows, it is impossible to get real work done in the Congress. ~ Bernie Sanders

He especially enjoyed watching Mrs. Sen as she chopped things, seated on newspapers on the living room floor. Instead of a knife she used a blade that curved like the prow of a Viking ship, sailing to battle in distant seas. The blade was hinged at one end to a narrow wooden base. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

My brothers and my sisters, do always persevere in true and earnest prayer, and the Lord will hear you. Believe that the highest revelations of science are conformable to the doctrine of the efficacy of prayer; that in this doctrine the highest philosophy harmonizes with the purest devotion. ~ Keshub Chandra Sen

We can't tell an electorate ... when you have something like in excess of 300 million people without any access to electricity at all that you have to put a cap on this. ~ Ronen Sen

Class war is not the cause of social progress; it is a disease developed in the course of social progress. The cause of the disease is the inability to subsist, and the result of the disease is war. ~ Sun Yat-sen

Incivility is a symptom, not the disease. We've always had partisan conflict in Congress, and we always will. Yet when I worked for a year (1970-71) on the staff of Sen. Ed Muskie of Maine, this was a different place, more collegial, more sensitive to data, more concerned about all of the American people. I think because the for-profit media prizes conflict above cooperation and sound bites above analysis, politicians have learned to adapt to those tendencies. Consequently, our public debates are dumbed down as our problems grow more complex. ~ Tom Allen

[T]here's a good reason to stay pessimistic about deficits as far as the eye can see. It's called the 'news' media. Legislators who want to get re-elected will clearly want to avoid any spending decision that will create bad national publicity, and our news media, the manufacturers of bad national publicity, will send crying victims down the assembly line at the slightest thought of a social spending cut or freeze. Exhibit A is Sen. Jim Bunning. ~ L. Brent Bozell, Jr.

The trial organized with U.N. participation of some kind will be for crimes committed by Khmer Rouge leaders from 1975 to 1979. That's it. ~ Hun Sen

We all know Sen. Feinstein is out of touch, but just to make it worse, by not embracing today's technology, she isn't even connected. Out of touch and disconnected. ~ Elizabeth Emken

I had wanted to hate you that day. Believe me, I had. And then suddenly, staring at me incredulously, your extra half-tooth had blurted out aloud, 'You get dimples on both cheeks!' your immaculate lisp intact, on both the 's'es. I remember that second, the way your hair fell, the nankhatais on my tongue and the strains of Akhtar's melody in the air. I had fallen in love with you then. I miss that second.'
('Left from Dhakeshwari') ~ Kunal Sen

If the idea of revolution is to win out, it must be through political enlightenment. It is useless to try to impose it by force of arms. ~ Sun Yat-sen

When politicians like Sen. Joseph Lieberman target video game violence, perhaps it is to distract attention from the material conditions that give rise to a culture of domestic violence, the economic policies that make it harder for most of us to own our own homes, and the development practices which pave over the old grasslands and forests. Video games did not make backyard play spaces disappear; rather, they offer children some way to respond to domestic confinement. ~ Henry Jenkins

Let there be no mistake, Sen Sanders, his campaign and the vigorous debate that we've had about how to raise incomes, how to reduce inequality, increase upward mobility, has been very good for the Democratic Party and for America. ~ Hillary Clinton

Another rain-swept day leaves everything water-logged - ponds, drains, streets, and rivers - everywhere water is overflowing. The green blades of grass in the garden lie submerged under a rippling shallow sheet of water. Through refraction, they take on magical underwater seaweed shapes. Except here, the grass is evenly cropped, so it appears as a glazed woven mat of wet-green. Rain has also left the plants and trees gleaming, bursting in plentitude.

Natural irrigation in excess creates its own slow rot, a sublime slime of wet decay and birth, profusion and irresistibility. Rain has this special seductive appeal - its innocuous wet, its piercing strength, its gentle drizzle-caresses, its ability to douse and arouse. The entire charm lies in its simplicity. ~ Sudeep Sen

Everything that you can ever sense
Is not quiet.

Not even quiet is quiet. ~ Sayantan Sen

At eighteen, she already looks like a woman of sorrows and as her breaths start becoming shorter, tired of looking over her shoulder, she only wants to get away from this city where no one can fathom her love- boundless and profane and real, like her skin and her lips and the insides of her thighs. She knows she can smile, smell like the others. Her skin would bleed too if pricked and yet this reality does not belong to the ones sleeping on the platform floor; this reality is hers and her alone. Thus when she puts the mirror back, she rummages in her handbag, searching for that thing called identity: some of it lost somewhere in the railway colony she had just left behind, some in Sudhanshu's left jacket pocket, the rest of it scattered here around broken teacups on railings, totally aberrant and arbitrary. ~ Kunal Sen

I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia [Sen. Robert C. Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan recruiter] that he would have been a great senator at any moment ... He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this nation. ~ Christopher Dodd

Should Sen. McCain capture the nomination as many assume, I believe this general election will offer the worst choices for President in my lifetime. I certainly can't vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama based on their virulently anti-family policy positions. ~ James Dobson