Amartya Sen Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

The elimination of ignorance, of illiteracy ... and of needless inequalities in opportunities (is) to be seen as objectives that are valued for their own sake. They expand our freedom to lead the lives we have reason to value, and these elementary capabilities are of importance on their own — Amartya Sen

Prolixity is not alien to us in India. We are able to talk at some length. — 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

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

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

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. — Amartya Sen

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

You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable. — 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

Development requires major source of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states. — Amartya Sen

Nor let us be resentful when others differ from us. For all men have hearts, and each heart has its own leanings. Their right is our wrong, and our right is their wrong. — 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

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. — Amartya Sen

one must go through war to reach peace.4 — 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

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

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. — 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

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

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

The market economy succeeds not because some people's interests are suppressed and other people are kept out of the market, but because people gain individual advantage from it. — Amartya Sen

We need to ask the moral questions: Do I have a right to be rich? And do I have a right to be content living in a world with so much poverty and inequality? These questions motivate us to view the issue of inequality as central to human living. — 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 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. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedoms are not only the primary ends of development, they are also among its principal means. — Amartya Sen

I have not had any serious non-academic job. — Amartya Sen

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

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

Unceasing change turns the wheel of life, and so reality is shown in all it's many forms. Dwell peacefully as change itself liberates all suffering sentient beings and brings them great joy. — 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

Democracy is a universal value — Amartya Sen

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

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

Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency. The removal of substantial unfreedoms, it is argued here, is constitutive of development. — 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

Development cannot really be so centered only on those in power. — 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

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

Globalization is a complex issue, partly because economic globalization is only one part of it. Globalization is greater global closeness, and that is cultural, social, political, as well as economic. — 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

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

I don't think that India is much celebrated for its democracy. Democracy has been a very neglected commodity at home and abroad. — 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

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

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

When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh. — Amartya Sen

Hindutava's nationalism ignores the rationalist traditions of India, a country in which some of the earliest steps in algebra, geometry, and astronomy were taken, where the decimal system emerged, where early philosophy - secular as well as religious - achieved exceptional sophistication, where people invented games like chess, pioneered sex education, and began the first systematic study of political economy. The Hindu militant chooses instead to present India - explicitly or implicitly - as a country of unquestioning idolaters, delirious fanatics, belligerent devotees, and religious murderers — Amartya Sen

[N]o democracy with a free press has ever experienced a major famine. — Amartya Sen

Globalization can be very unjust and unfair and unequal, but these are matters under our control. It's not that we don't need the market economy. We need it. But the market economy should not have priority or dominance over other institutions. — Amartya Sen

The identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute — Amartya Sen

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

The Affluent Society not only changed the way the country viewed itself, but gave new phrases to the language: Conventional wisdom, the bland leading the bland, private opulence and public squalor. — 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

Progress is more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulent — 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

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

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

Virtually everything we do is dependent on others, from the arts and culture to farmers who grow the food we eat. Quite a lot of the differences that make us rich and poor are matters just of luck. To somehow revel in one's privilege would be a mistake. An even bigger mistake would be trying to convert that into a theory that the rich are so much more productive than many of us. — Amartya Sen

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

Economics, as it has emerged, can be made more productive by paying greater and more explicit attention to the ethical considerations that shape human behaviour and judgment. — 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

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting. — 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

If the knowledge of torture of others makes you sick, it is a case of sympathy ... It can be argued that behaviour based on sympathy is in an important sense egoistic, for one is oneself pleased at others' pleasure and pained at others' pain, and the pursuit of one's own utility may thus be helped by sympathetic action. — Amartya Sen

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

To conclude this discussion, assessment of justice demands engagement with the 'eyes of mankind',
first, because we may variously identify with the others elsewhere and not just with our local community;
second, because our choices and actions may affect the lives of others far as well as near;
and third,because what they see from their respective perspective of history and geography may help us to overcome our own parochialism. — Amartya Sen

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

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

No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy. — 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

Empowering women is key to building a future we want — Amartya Sen

The best hope for peace in the world lies in the simple but far-reaching recognition that we all have many different associations and affiliations, and we need not see ourselves as being rigidly divided by a single categorization of hardened groups, which confront each other. — Amartya Sen

I attempted to see famines as broad "economic" problems (concentrating on how people can buy food, or otherwise get entitled to it), rather than in terms of the grossly undifferentiated picture of aggregate food supply for the economy as a whole. — 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

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

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

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. — Amartya Sen

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

Poverty is the deprivation of opportunity. — 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

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. — 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

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