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

There's absolutely no reason why at the level of basic schooling that there should be any inequity whatsoever. And [that's] the first direction to go, [but] that need not prevent you from doing all the other equalities that you want.

In India, [in] the great documents like [the] Upanishads in eighth century B.C., you find some of the wisest [women] making great, learned speeches and then you worship them, but actually don't do very much about girls' education generally. So I think there has been a kind of dual presence of pain, respect, and saying you are great, etc., but not providing the basic facilities that make women able to lead the kind of life that they would like to and that men easily do.

[N]o democracy with a free press has ever experienced a major famine.

Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty

the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute

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.