Poverty is not really as much of an obstacle to educational expansion as it's sometimes made out to be.

Imparting education not only enlightens the receiver, but also broadens the giver - the teachers, the parents, the friends.

The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.

I really do believe that education, despite this massive potential in transforming human lives, has not received the kind of attention that people should have given to it.

From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.

One has to be realistic. One’s concern for equity and justice in the world must not carry one into the alien territory of unreasoned belief. That’s very important.

80 percent of the export of armament in the world comes from the G8 countries. [The] United States alone exports about 50 percent of the world's armament, [for] which, of course, there has to be buyers, and the buyers are very terribly keen, very often military dictator[s] or sometimes not military dictator[s] but for military purposes. But the sellers are also promoting this trade. And two thirds of the arm exports go to developing countries. I'm in favor of putting a control on it, a ban on it.