I think education has a bigger impact on the lives of people than absolutely anything else.

But once we recognize that many ideas that are taken to be quintessentially Western have also flourished in other civilizations, we also see that these ideas are not as culture-specific as is sometimes claimed. We need not begin with pessimism, at least on this ground, about the prospects of reasoned humanism in the world.

I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.

It is important to reclaim for humanity the ground that has been taken from it by various arbitrarily narrow formulations of the demands of rationality

No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.

The governments and the hard-headed military establishment and the general conservative part of America have never taken much interest in democracy, anyway.

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.