But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.

You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable.

Progress is more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulent

Democracy is a universal value

In all kinds of ways there are different freedoms that effect our lives and you can assess what our lives are like by looking at the various freedoms that we have.

When I was giving a lecture in India, the capabilities that I have to be concerned with there, namely the ability of people to go to a school, to be literate, to be able to have a basic health care everywhere, to be able to seek some kind of medical response to one's ailment; these become central issues in the Indian context which they're not in the UK, because you're well beyond that.

To say that the whole of the industrial experience of Europe and America just shows the rewards of exploiting the Third World is a gross simplification.