“the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute”
― 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
“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
“The purely rational economic man is, indeed, close to being a social moron.”
― 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
"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
"Economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable - and unethical."
― Amartya Sen
"I believe that virtually all the problems in the world come from inequality of one kind or another."
― Amartya Sen
"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
"Poverty is the deprivation of opportunity."
― Amartya Sen
"Empowering women is key to building a future we want."
― 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
"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
"Progress is more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulent."
― 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
"The identity of just one thing, the "clash of civilization" view that you're a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Christian, I think that's such a limited way of seeing humanity, and schools have the opportunity to bring out the fact that we have hundreds of identities. We have our national identity. We have our cultural identity, linguistic identity, religious identity. Yes, cultural identity, professional identity, all kinds of ways."
― Amartya Sen
"A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting."
― Amartya Sen
"I think that so many of our abilities to do things depend on interaction with each other."
― Amartya Sen
"There are Muslims of all kinds. The idea of closing them into a single identity is wrong."
― Amartya Sen
"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."
― Amartya Sen
"The Arab world is also the world that produced some of the greatest improvements in mathematics and in science. Even today, when a Princeton mathematician does an algorithm, he may not remember that "algorithm" derived from the name al-Khwarizmi, who is a ninth-century Arab mathematician."
― 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