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

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.

I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.

Capability is just a concept of what is it we're looking at. Now how far we can go along that and what new capabilities become possible is something we have to judge.

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.

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.

The anti-globalization movement is one of the biggest globalized events of the contemporary world, people coming from everywhere, —Australia, Indonesia, Britain, India, Poland, Germany, South Africa—to demonstrate in Seattle or Quebec. What could be more global than that?