Amartya Sen > Quotes

“the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute”
― Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

“A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.”
― 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, The Idea of Justice

“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

“A defeated argument that refuses to be obliterated can remain very alive.”
― Amartya Sen

“While we cannot live without history, we need not live within it either.”
― Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

“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
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― 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 Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

“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

“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, The Idea of Justice

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

“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.”
― 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, Development as Freedom

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

“Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be. Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to argue back.”
― Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

“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, The Idea of Justice

“It is hard to understand how a compassionate world order can include so many people afflicted by acute misery, persistent hunger and deprived and desperate lives, and why millions of innocent children have to die each year from lack of food or medical attention or social care.
This issue, of course, is not new, and it has been a subject of some discussion among theologians. The argument that God has reasons to want us to deal with these matters ourselves has had considerable intellectual support. As a nonreligious person, I am not in a position to assess the theological merits of this argument. But I can appreciate the force of the claim that people themselves must have responsibility for the development and change of the world in which they live. One does not have to be either devout or non devout to accept this basic connection. As people who live-in a broad sense-together, we cannot escape the thought that the terrible occurrences that we see around us are quintessentially our problems. They are our responsibility-whether or not they are also anyone else's.
As competent human beings, we cannot shirk the task of judging how things are and what needs to be done. As reflective creatures, we have the ability to contemplate the lives of others. Our sense of behavior may have caused (though that can be very important as well), but can also relate more generally to the miseries that we see around us and that lie within our power to help remedy. That responsibility is not, of course, the only consideration that can claim our attention, but to deny the relevance of that general claim would be to miss something central about our social existence. It is not so much a matter of having the exact rules about how precisely we ought to behave, as of recognizing the relevance of our shared humanity in making the choices we face.”
― Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom

“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, Development as Freedom

“التفكير مهم جدًا لفهم العدالة حتى في عالم فيه كثير من الجنون.”
― Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice

“A good statement of an inherently imprecise concern – and most important concerns in the world are imprecise – must capture that imprecision, and not replace it by a precise statement about something else. You should learn to speak in an articulate way about ideas that are inescapably imprecise (as a man called Aristotle explained more than two millennia ago). And that is one of the reasons why the humanities are important. A novel can point to a truth without pretending to capture it exactly in some imagined numbers and formulae.”
― Amartya Sen, A Wish a Day for a Week

“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, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

“إنّ الادعاء بأن الناس سيوافقون على طرح معين إن كان لهم أن يفكروا بحريةٍ وحيدة لا يفترض أن الناس كذلك فعلاً”
― Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice

“ما يمكن أن يقال على أي حال يمكن قوله بوضوح؛ وما لا يستطيع المرء قوله، عليه أن يسكت عنه.”
― Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice

“العدالة مرتبطة في النهاية بطريقة حياة الناس، لا بطبيعة المؤسسات المحيطة بهم فحسب.”
― Amartya Sen, فكرة العدالة

“أن يكون المرء أذكى قد يساعده ذلك على فهم ليس فقط مصلحته الشخصية، بل كيف يمكن أن تتأثر حيوات الآخرين تأثراً شديداً بأفعاله.”
― Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice

“The powerful effect of female literacy contrasts with the comparatively ineffective roles of, say, male literacy or general poverty reduction as instruments of child mortality reduction. The increase in male literacy over the same range (from 22 to 75 percent) only reduces under-five mortality from 169 per thousand to 141 per thousand. And a 50 percent reduction in the incidence of poverty (from the actual 1981 level) only reduces the predicted value of under-five mortality from 156 per thousand to 153 per thousand.

Here again, the message seems to be that some variables relating to women's agency (in this case, female literacy) often play a much more important role in promoting social well-being (in particular, child survival) than variables relating to the general level of opulence in the society. These findings have important practical implications. Both types of variables can be influenced through public action, but respectively require rather different forms of public intervention.”
― Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom

“يمكن أن تنبثق من الناس متنوعي التجارب والمشارب نقاشات عقلانية متضادة، لكن هذه تأتي كذلك من مجتمع بعينه ، أو من وجهة النظر هذه من الشخص نفسه .”
― Amartya Sen, فكرة العدالة

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; … Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; … Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.53”
― Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

“Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror. The”
― Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny