Education can really transform the insecurities in the world into a bigger vision of what we are as human beings.

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.

If the government is vulnerable to public opinion, then famines are a dreadfully bad thing to have. You can’t win many elections after a famine, and you don’t like being criticized by newspapers, opposition parties in parliament, and so on. Democracy gives the government an immediate political incentive to act.

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 live in a world community, and economic contact has partly contributed to that. It’s also the case that economic opportunity opened up by economic contact has helped to a great extent to reduce poverty in many parts of the world.

The lack of economic freedom could be a very major reason for loss of liberty, liberty of life.

When the government is trying to penny-pinch and, at the same time, trying to keep a defense expenditure and so forth, which are regarded as quote unquote essential, the education is regarded inessential.