Top 70 Amartya Sen Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Empowering women is key to building a future we want.”

— Amartya Sen

2. “Economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable – and unethical.”

— Amartya Sen

3. “Poverty is not just a lack of money; it is not having the capability to realize one’s full potential as a human being.”

— Amartya Sen

4. “Poverty is the deprivation of opportunity.”

— Amartya Sen

5. “Freedoms are not only the primary ends of development, they are also among its principal means.”

— Amartya Sen

6. “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

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

— Amartya Sen

8. “Democracy is a universal value.”

— Amartya Sen

9. “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.”

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

13. “Imparting education not only enlightens the receiver, but also broadens the giver – the teachers, the parents, the friends.”

— Amartya Sen

14. “A defeated argument that refuses to be obliterated can remain very alive.”

— Amartya Sen

15. “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

16. “No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.”

— Amartya Sen

17. “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

18. “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

19. “A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.”

— Amartya Sen

20. “There is considerable evidence that women’s education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children.”

— Amartya Sen

21. “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

22. “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

23. “If a theory of justice is to guide reasoned choice of policies, strategies or institutions, then the identification of fully just social arrangements is neither necessary nor sufficient.”

— Amartya Sen

24. “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

25. “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

26. “Resenting the obtuseness of others is not good ground for shooting oneself in the foot.”

— Amartya Sen

27. “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

28. “Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror.”

— Amartya Sen

29. “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

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

— Amartya Sen

31. “Progress is more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulent.”

— Amartya Sen

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.”

— Amartya Sen

36. “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

37. “But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.”

— Amartya Sen

38. “The purely rational economic man is, indeed, close to being a social moron.”

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

40. “Human ordeals thrive on ignorance. To understand a problem with clarity is already half way towards solving it.”

— Amartya Sen

41. “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

42. “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

43. “Silence is a powerful enemy of social justice.”

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

45. “Anything that increases the voice of young women tends therefore to reduce the fertility rate.”

— Amartya Sen

46. “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

47. “There are few subjects that match the social significance of women’s education in the contemporary world.”

— Amartya Sen

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

— Amartya Sen

49. “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

50. “I think that so many of our abilities to do things depend on interaction with each other.”

— Amartya Sen