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.

China had managed to reduce their fertility to a large extent because of basic expansion of women's education, not because of the one-child family.

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 think the UN's role - especially since it's not an extremely rich fund, and that's to put it mildly - is mainly to act as a leading thinker of the world in terms of how to think about the future.

[To organize a school] looks much more difficult in theory than it does in practice.

But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.

Economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable - and unethical.