Amartya Sen Quotes
-
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.
→ -
If jobs are important, education is important.
→ -
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.
→ -
Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty
→ -
The governments and the hard-headed military establishment and the general conservative part of America have never taken much interest in democracy, anyway.
→ -
South Korea at the end of the Second World War had a very low level of literacy. But suddenly, like in Japan, they determined they were going in that direction. In 20 years' time, they had transformed themselves. So when people go on saying that it's all because of perennial culture, which you cannot change, that's not the way the South Korean economy was viewed before the war ended. But again within 30 years, people went on saying there's an ancient culture in Korea that has been pro-education, which is true.
→ -
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.
→ -
Poverty is the deprivation of opportunity.
→ -
The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.
→ -
The notion of human right builds on our shared humanity. These rights are not derived from the citizenship of any country, or the membership of any nation, but are presumed to be claims or entitlements of every human being. They differ, therefore, from constitutionally created rights guaranteed for specific people.
→ -
Its 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.
→ -
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.
→ -
No substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic country - no matter how poor.
→ -
Human development, as an approach, is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it.
→ -
Gender inequality is not one problem, it's a collection of problems.
→ -
I have not had any serious non-academic job.
→ -
Democracy is a universal value
→ -
Each human being is a citizen of the world. We have many identities, of which one of the identities is our human identity. And that's something that the schools can provide, but that requires again a vision rather than being centers of hatred. It could be an enormous opportunity to give that mission.
→ -
Its 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.
→ -
Poverty is a big barrier if you are at the bottom layer of society, don't know where the next meal is coming from. It is not a big barrier of taking the rich with the poor in a big society to provide schooling for all.
→ -
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.
→ -
When the government is trying to penny-pinch and, at the same time, trying to keep a defense expenditure and so forth, which are regarded as quote unquote essential, the education is regarded inessential.
→ -
The fact that schools can actually be a major factor in cementing the world is a factor that's worth considering, the fact that we all have a shared human identity in addition to many other identities.
→ -
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.
→ -
[To organize a school] looks much more difficult in theory than it does in practice.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Empowering women is key to building a future we want
→ -
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.
→ -
One has to bring the multidimensional impact that schooling makes in the lives of people. There's nothing like it, and I think the importance of it has to be shaken into people's understanding and determination.
→
Related Authors
-
Mahbub ul Haq Economist -
Jeremy Bentham Philosopher -
-
Ronald Dworkin Philosopher -
Adam Smith Philosopher -
Kenneth Arrow Economist -
Manmohan Singh Prime Minister of India -
Narendra Modi Prime Minister of India -
Rabindranath Tagore Author -
Satyajit Ray Filmmaker -
Martha C. Nussbaum Philosopher -
Karl Marx Philosopher -
Mother Teresa Saint -
Joseph Stiglitz Economist -
Jeffrey Sachs Economist -
John Maynard Keynes Economist -
Milton Friedman Economist -
John Rawls Philosopher -
Jean Dreze Economist -
Robert Nozick Philosopher