Amartya Sen Quotes

More people in more countries, both developing and developed, have experienced larger increases in living standards than in any prior fifty year period.

Prosperity cannot be divorced from humanity.

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.

Economic growth and human development need to go hand in hand. Human values need to be advocated vigorously.

Poverty and backwardness in the midst of clear waters and verdant mountains is no good, nor is it to have prosperity and wealth while the environment deteriorates.

Africa's success stories are delivering the whole range of the public goods and services that citizens have a right to expect and are forging a path that we hope more will follow.

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.

Bend everything toward improving the standard of living of the people.

China is a developing country and we regard subsistence as the fundamental human right.

Growth and prosperity. These are the blocks with which we must build our welfare society.

It is past time to acknowledge that economic growth … is good, and that what the world needs is more of it.

… authors generally neglect that growth has lifted billions of people out of grinding poverty and that others may remain poor because of the developed world’s environmental concerns …

The object sought to be accomplished is the improvement of the condition of man. The mode by which it is to be accomplished is that of increasing his productive power. The more food a man can raise, the more and better food may he consume, and the larger will be the surplus that can be appropriated to the purchase of clothing, to the education of his family, to the enlargement of his house, or to the improvement of his machinery, and the greater will be the amount of leisure that can be appropriated to the improvement of his modes of thought.

States and nations do not build wealth by storing cash in a bank vault. They build wealth by expanding human solutions to human problems in order that more and more of her people — living and yet to be born — are able to enjoy a higher quality of life.

It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB - general well-being.

Development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies.

Equity, dignity, happiness, sustainability - these are all fundamental to our lives but absent in the GDP.

To build socialism means not only building gigantic factories and flour mills. This is essential but not enough for building socialism. People must grow in mind and heart.

Land is the productivity of our country.

Prosperity comes slowly.

We have no longer States that are necessarily only planting States. None are excluded from achieving that diversification of pursuits among the people which brings wealth and contentment.

We will focus on the Zambian people as both the end and the means of development

Opulent, civilized, and industrious nations, are greater consumers than poor ones, because they are infinitely greater producers.

Development has to rise if population is going to increase, Otherwise people will starve and all kinds of other problems.