A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

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

It seems to me to be kind of inescapable that one has to be interested in the issue of gender and gender equality. I don’t really expect any credit for going in that direction. It’s the only natural direction to go in. Why is it that some people don’t see that as so patently obvious as it should be?

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

Any classification according to a singular identity polarizes people in a particular way, but if we take note of the fact that we have many different identities - related not just to religion but also to language, occupation and business, politics, class and poverty, and many others - we can see that the polarization of one can be resisted by a fuller picture. So knowledge and understanding are extremely important to fight against singular polarization.

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.

There are Muslims of all kinds. The idea of closing them into a single identity is wrong.