List of Amartya Sen Quotes

When I Was Giving A Lecture In India, The Capabilities That I Have To Be Concerned With There, Namely The Ability Of People To Go To A School, To Be Literate, To Be Able To Have A Basic Health Care Everywhere, To Be Able To Seek Some Kind Of Medical Response To One's Ailment; These Become Central Issues In The Indian Context Which They're Not In The Uk, Because You're Well Beyond That.

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?

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.

I Think The Whole Progress Over The Last Two Or Three Millennia Has Been Entirely Dependent On Ideas And Techniques And Commodities And People Moving From One Part Of The World To Another. It Seems Difficult To Take An Anti-globalization View If One Takes Globalization Properly In Its Full Sense.

It’s Scandalous When One Thinks About The People Who Live In A World In Which They Need Not Be Hungry, In Which They Need Not Die Without Medical Care, In Which They Need Not Be Illiterate, They Need Not Feel Hopeless And Miserable So Much Of The Time, And Yet They Are.

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.

Sometimes One Makes A Distinction Between Urgency And Importance. And While Disasters Are Urgent, The Basically Most Important Thing Is Education. And That's What Gives It Ultimately Urgency Too, Because Unless You Do It Now, This Important Thing Gets Again And Again Postponed.

Even In Areas Like The Most Depressed Region Of India In Terms Of Female Education, Namely Rajasthan, Which Has [one Of] The Lowest Female Literacy [rates] In India. Even There, 80 To 90 Percent Of The Parents Would Like Their Girls To Go To School. And Indeed, About 80 Percent Would Like Them To Be Made Compulsory.

The Higher Education Has Always Appealed To The South Asian Social Leaders Across All The Countries In South Asia. But Primary Education Has Been Neglected. The Oddity, By The Way, Is If You Look At The Contrast In India, There Are Some Areas Like Kerala Where There's A Long History Of Educational Development.

I Think One Big Thing About The United States Is That The American Population, They May Be Excited About Iraq Or One Thing Or Another, But Basically Has Had A Great Deal Of Interest In Humanitarian Causes Both Within The Country And Abroad. Even When They Criticize The Mechanism To Which It Flows.

South Korea From A Country That Had Relatively Little Primary Education Became Close To Universal Literacy In The Course Of 25, 30 Years, In A Way Trying To Replicate What Japan Had Done Earlier. They Were Learning To Some Extent From The Japanese Experience Too. So I Think, In A Sense, The East Asians Were Following A Path, Which All Other Countries Including South Asia Could Follow But Chose Not Too.

Every Time You Have An Opportunity Of Opening A School, Its Fee And Funding Is Really Relatively Small In Comparison With The Big Expenditure, Which Is Basically Quote Unquote Defense. I Think If There Were Fees, Progress Could Be Very Much Faster. But For That We Need Not Only The Government In Different Countries To Understand It But The Society To Put Pressure On It, The Parents To Understand That Their Desire To Have Their Children Educated Can Actually Be Realized, And It Could Make A Dramatic Difference.