Quote collection
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"Theres a clear and strong connection between fertility reduction and womens literacy and empowerment, including womens gainful employment. If you look at the more than 300 districts of India, the strongest influences in explaining fertility variations are womens literacy and gainful economic employment."
"You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable."
"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."
"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."
"Anything that increases the voice of young women tends therefore to reduce the fertility rate."
"There are some people who say that theyre concerned only with poverty but not inequality. But I dont think that is a sustainable thought. A lot of poverty is, in fact, inequality because of the connection between income and capabilityhaving adequate resources to take part in the life of the community."
"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."
"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"
"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."
"When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh."
"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."
"The lack of economic freedom could be a very major reason for loss of liberty, liberty of life."
"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."
"Democracy is a universal value"
"People's identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way - quite suddenly - to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities."
"South Korea at the end of the Second World War had a very low level of literacy. But suddenly, like in Japan, they determined they were going in that direction. In 20 years' time, they had transformed themselves. So when people go on saying that it's all because of perennial culture, which you cannot change, that's not the way the South Korean economy was viewed before the war ended. But again within 30 years, people went on saying there's an ancient culture in Korea that has been pro-education, which is true."
"The exchange between different cultures can not possibly be seen as a threat, when it is friendly. But I believe that the dissatisfaction with the overall architecture often depends on the quality of leadership."
"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."
"There are few subjects that match the social significance of women's education in the contemporary world."
"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."