There is considerable evidence that women's education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children

China had managed to reduce their fertility to a large extent because of basic expansion of women's education, not because of the one-child family.

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.

I attempted to see famines as broad "economic" problems (concentrating on how people can buy food, or otherwise get entitled to it), rather than in terms of the grossly undifferentiated picture of aggregate food supply for the economy as a whole.

Human ordeals thrive on ignorance. To understand a problem with clarity is already half way towards solving it.

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

The elimination of ignorance, of illiteracy... and of needless inequalities in opportunities (is) to be seen as objectives that are valued for their own sake. They expand our freedom to lead the lives we have reason to value, and these elementary capabilities are of importance on their own