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.

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.

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.

It seems to me to be kind of inescapable that one has to be interested in the issue of gender and gender equality. I don’t really expect any credit for going in that direction. It’s the only natural direction to go in. Why is it that some people don’t see that as so patently obvious as it should be?

the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute

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.

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.