Opportunity could be defined in so many ways. There's one way of defining it, equality of opportunity, which is in fact the equality of capability, but the libertarians got there first and they have - like the Americans getting onto the moon, naming every crater after something like an astronaut - they have got there and named "opportunity" in a way that we cannot get ownership of now.

I think that so many of our abilities to do things depend on interaction with each other.

Poverty is the deprivation of opportunity.

We might have reason to be driven! We live for a short stretch of time in a world we share with others. Virtually everything we do is dependent on others, from the arts and culture to farmers who grow the food we eat.

Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence... they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and... a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have.

Economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable - and unethical.

Globalization can be very unjust and unfair and unequal, but these are matters under our control. It’s not that we don’t need the market economy. We need it. But the market economy should not have priority or dominance over other institutions.