Anything that increases the voice of young women tends therefore to reduce the fertility rate.

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.

Hardly any famine affects more than 5 percent, almost never more than 10 percent, of the population. The largest proportion of a population affected was the Irish famine of the 1840s, which came close to 10 percent over a number of years.

No substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic country - no matter how poor.

The success of a society is to be evaluated primarily by the freedoms that members of the society enjoy.

The governments and the hard-headed military establishment and the general conservative part of America have never taken much interest in democracy, anyway.

The themes that the anti-globalization protesters bring to the discussion are of extraordinary importance. However, the theses that they often bring to it, sometimes in the form of slogans, are often oversimple.