Quotes About Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen is best known to the general reader for his powerful essays on famine. He is an optimist about some of our gravest economic problems, such as mass starvation in a world that at present can easily produce more food than everyone can eat. Reason and voluntary participation are his watchwords.

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

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

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.

Though Buddhism is a religion like any other, it began with at least two specific characteristics that were quite unusual, to wit, its foundational agnosticism and its commitment to public communication and discussion.

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

I still practise her remedy for hiccups – slowly drinking a glass of cold water with a couple of spoons of sugar stirred in. This, incidentally, is a much pleasanter way of overcoming hiccups than by choking yourself out of breath.

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

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

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.

That sense of degradation, of being labeled inferior, is a central feature of the whirlpool of the working poor. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen has said that shame is the "irreducible absolutist core" of the experience of poverty. Poverty is about not just income but also humiliation, social exclusion, the stress of being forever lower on the social ladder.