Amartya Sen Quotes

During this glorious reign Ireland has seen 1,225,000 of her children die of famine, starved to death whilst the produce of her soil and their labor was eaten up by a vulture aristocracy, enforcing their rents by the bayonets of a hired assassin army in the pay of the –best of the English Queens’

The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.

Ireland never lacked the capacity to feed its people. During the entire 'great famine,' the island continued to produce massive amounts of beef and grain. The Irish just couldn't afford to buy any of it due to the enforcement of rack-renting, high taxation, and suppression of manufactures.

We stand by as children starve by the millions because we lack the will to end hunger. But we have found the will to develop missiles capable of flying over the polar cap and landing within a few hundred feet of their target. This is not innovation. It is a profound distortion of humanity's purpose on earth.

The Christians seized all the maize the locals of Nicaragua had grown for themselves and their own families and, as a consequence, some twenty or thirty thousand natives died of hunger, some mothers even killing their own children and eating them.

I agree with Kathi Zellweger that sanctions mostly punish the ordinary people who live at the edge of starvation.

Writing or talking about famine and the world's response to it is not very easy.

It takes four months to ship food aid and 40 percent of the cost is in the shipping. People cannot eat shipping costs. We have had people die when there are surpluses in the markets.

We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that's what's happening. Too many people there. They can't support themselves - and it's not an inhuman thing to say. It's the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it's going to get worse and worse.

I believe that one of the saddest things in the world today is that some people don't have enough food to nourish themselves. It's the 21st century and that's really not acceptable, so if I could do something that would change that I would be really happy.

Ethiopia is engraved on my heart. I first went in 1973 because I heard of a terrible famine. They were denying it even as we got the film out. The coverage destroyed the emperor's credibility.

Most governments in the United States in a hundred years have not respected the peoples of Latin America. They have sponsored coup d'etats, assassinations.

It's not natural disasters that are to blame for the deprivation of the North Korean people, but the failed policies of Kim Jong Il.

Kissinger's orchestration of political and military and diplomatic cover for apartheid in South Africa presents us with a morally repulsive record and includes the appalling consequences of the destabilization of Angola

There is no military government on earth that does not have human rights abuses.

This year, between 20 and 30 million persons will die of hunger in Russia …. Perhaps it is well that it should be so, for certain nations must be decimated.

We have ended hunger, but now we have to end famine.

We will be guilty of criminal negligence, without extenuation, if we permit future famines.

We as politicians have to understand that the greatest threats to our security are no longer conventional military ones. You cannot nuke a famine.

Many people - when they think about North Korea and the dictatorship, or the military or nuclear weapons, nuclear missiles, those things - tend to forget ordinary citizens are living there.

Those who lived in peaceful nations had looked the other way as members of their own species starved on their door step.

If any good comes out of the current famine in the Horn of Africa - amidst the pictures of mothers carrying dying babies at their shrivelled breasts and hollow-eyed children with swollen bellies and matchstick limbs - it will be galvanising the world on the need to ensure access to nutritious food for the world's most vulnerable people.

You don't help a country by supporting a military regime that denies any sign of democracy, and what defeated Pakistan was its military regime.

It's unconscionable to breed with the number of children who are starving to death in impoverished countries.

The hungry nations of the world cry out to the peoples blessed with abundance. And the Church, cut to the quick by this cry, asks each and every man to hear his brother's plea and answer it lovingly.