Latest Amartya Sen Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I really do believe that education, despite this massive potential in transforming human lives, has not received the kind of attention that people should have given to it.

  Amartya Sen

  Believe, Should Have, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I guess some of the most delightful moments of my teenage years were when I was trying not just to educate myself but trying to educate others. And I could see how the lives of children could be transformed in that.

  Amartya Sen

  Children, Teenage, Years

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Belonging to humanity is a great thing for us, and I think the schools can do it. So I think we can look after the quality of education on the school even as we expand the availability of schooling.

  Amartya Sen

  School, Thinking, Availability

  Source: www.pbs.org

• There's no reason why one need not look at the content of education just as one is expanding the availability of school, because it doesn't cost more money to get them [a] better education. It requires better textbooks, it requires a vision, it requires a determination, but it's not very expensive to do that anyway.

  Amartya Sen

  Determination, School, Availability

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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

  School, Opportunity, Giving

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Poverty is a big barrier if you are at the bottom layer of society, don't know where the next meal is coming from. It is not a big barrier of taking the rich with the poor in a big society to provide schooling for all.

  Amartya Sen

  Meals, Layers, Next

  Source: www.pbs.org

• One of the things that any kind of studies bring out is that the mere act of schooling - getting together, the organization involved, going to classes on time, and there're things being taught, sitting down with others with different backgrounds, chatting with them, and, sometimes when there are big barriers, eating together when there are school meals, which are big things together with a big social impact - they themselves have a major effect.

  Amartya Sen

  School, Eating Together, Class

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Poverty is not really as much of an obstacle to educational expansion as it's sometimes made out to be.

  Amartya Sen

  Educational, Expansion, Poverty

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I don't think poverty provides that much of an obstacle to education as one thinks. I think the bigger obstacle to education is the fact that it's a very hard thing to do for a first-generation schoolgoer. Because not to have parents at home who can help you, motivate you, is a problem even when the parents are in the abstract very keen on children being educated.

  Amartya Sen

  Children, Home, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

• South Korea from a country that had relatively little primary education became close to universal literacy in the course of 25, 30 years, in a way trying to replicate what Japan had done earlier. They were learning to some extent from the Japanese experience too. So I think, in a sense, the East Asians were following a path, which all other countries including South Asia could follow but chose not too.

  Amartya Sen

  Country, Thinking, Korea

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Thailand's economic development was driven by educational expansion. That has been a very dramatic factor, and South Asia had been pretty miserable in not learning from that experience.

  Amartya Sen

  Educational, Asia, Expansion

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Sometimes one makes a distinction between urgency and importance. And while disasters are urgent, the basically most important thing is education. And that's what gives it ultimately urgency too, because unless you do it now, this important thing gets again and again postponed.

  Amartya Sen

  Giving, Important, Sometimes

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I think East Asian countries, I think they're very fortunate to have Buddhism survive as a strong influence because right from the time when Buddha himself, 2,500 years ago, made the point about the importance of education, and the word "Buddha" also means enlighten[ed] or educated. So all the Buddhist countries, not only Japan and Korea and China and Hong Kong and Thailand but also even Burma and Sri Lanka, had a higher level of education.

  Amartya Sen

  Country, Buddhist, Strong

  Source: www.pbs.org

• In absolutely every way, our lives are transformed by education and basic education in particular. So I would have thought that in any kind of system, to say that the priorities don't include education is a mistake, whether it's [at the] domestic level or at the global level.

  Amartya Sen

  Mistake, Priorities, Levels

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Education makes human beings more articulate. It transforms people. You can think differently about the world. It makes it possible for you to get jobs. It makes a dramatic difference. It generates a social equity that we need.

  Amartya Sen

  Jobs, Thinking, Differences

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Education could be a great vehicle for gender equity. It allows people to see what your rights are by reading. Quite often women, for example, may have rights that they are not in the position to actually make use of.

  Amartya Sen

  Reading, Rights, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Education can really transform the insecurities in the world into a bigger vision of what we are as human beings.

  Amartya Sen

  Insecurity, Vision, World

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I think education has a bigger impact on the lives of people than absolutely anything else.

  Amartya Sen

  Thinking, Impact, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• An Arab activist can take pride in the Arab heritage of mathematics and science or he can take pride in his religion, and there's pride to be taken in both. But one of them could be exploited much more easily and has been in the context of world conflict. And the other is very difficult to do on the grounds that science and literature and mathematics have been among the uniting factors in the history of the world.

  Amartya Sen

  Taken, Pride, Heritage

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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

  Names, Doe, Algorithms

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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

  Christian, Religious, Buddhist

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Education makes us the human beings we are. It has major impacts on economic development, on social equity, gender equity. In all kinds of ways, our lives are transformed by education and security. Even if it had not one iota of effect [on] security, it would still remain in my judgment the biggest priority in the world.

  Amartya Sen

  Impact, Priorities, Development

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The fact that schools can actually be a major factor in cementing the world is a factor that's worth considering, the fact that we all have a shared human identity in addition to many other identities.

  Amartya Sen

  School, Identity, World

  Source: www.pbs.org

• After all, the American society has been also based on the premise of expanding education very early. That's been [one] of the main sources of success of the Americans. And there is something that the world can learn from it and also be assisted by the United States along with Europe and the rest of the world. I really hope that this is an issue that engages the American public.

  Amartya Sen

  Europe, Issues, United States

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 80 percent of the export of armament in the world comes from the G8 countries. [The] United States alone exports about 50 percent of the world's armament, [for] which, of course, there has to be buyers, and the buyers are very terribly keen, very often military dictator[s] or sometimes not military dictator[s] but for military purposes. But the sellers are also promoting this trade. And two thirds of the arm exports go to developing countries. I'm in favor of putting a control on it, a ban on it.

  Amartya Sen

  Country, Military, Two

  Source: www.pbs.org