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.

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.

Opportunity could be defined in so many ways. There's one way of defining it, equality of opportunity, which is in fact the equality of capability, but the libertarians got there first and they have - like the Americans getting onto the moon, naming every crater after something like an astronaut - they have got there and named "opportunity" in a way that we cannot get ownership of now.

I was told Indian women don't think like that about equality. But I would like to argue that if they don't think like that they should be given a real opportunity to think like that.

There are some people who say that they’re concerned only with poverty but not inequality. But I don’t think that is a sustainable thought. A lot of poverty is, in fact, inequality because of the connection between income and capability—having adequate resources to take part in the life of the community.

There are Muslims of all kinds. The idea of closing them into a single identity is wrong.

I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.