Sarbani Sen Quotes

#1. Has anyone sen Mr Snark "
"I saw him in the tunnel about 15 minutes ago."
"Oh no " wailed Dr Ferman "he will have been atomised."
"Oh dear" muttered an MP. "Bye-election. #Quote by Alexander McCall Smith

#2. Ashoka supplemented this general moral and political principle by a dialectical argument based on enlightened self-interest: 'For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own sect, in reality inflicts, by such conduct, the severest injury on his own sect. #Quote by Amartya Sen

#3. When we undertake a task, we should not falter from first to last until the task is accomplished; if we fail, we should not begrudge our lives as a sacrifice-this is what we mean by loyalty. The ancient teaching of loyalty meant sometimes death. #Quote by Sun Yat-sen

#4. That was our first home. Before I felt like an island in an ocean, before Calcutta, before everything that followed. You know it wasn't a home at first but just a shell. Nothing ostentatious but just a rented two-room affair, an unneeded corridor that ran alongside them, second hand cane furniture, cheap crockery, two leaking faucets, a dysfunctional doorbell, and a flight of stairs that led to, but ended just before the roof (one of the many idiosyncrasies of the house), secured by a sixteen garrison lock, and a balcony into which a mango tree's branch had strayed. The house was in a building at least a hundred years old and looked out on a street and a tenement block across it. The colony, if you were to call it a colony, had no name. The house itself was seedy, decrepit, as though a safe-keeper of secrets and scandals. It had many entries and exits and it was possible to get lost in it. And in a particularly inspired stroke of whimsy architectural genius, it was almost invisible from the main road like H.G. Wells' 'Magic Shop'. As a result, we had great difficulty when we had to explain our address to people back home. It went somewhat like this, '... take the second one from the main road….and then right after turning left from Dhakeshwari, you will see a bird shop (unspecific like that, for it had no name either)… walk straight in and take the stairs at the end to go to the first floor, that's where we dwell… but don't press the bell, knock… and don't walk too close to t #Quote by Kunal Sen

#5. Every time I see a girl, I search for that innocence that she lost while growing up, under the burden of being a 'Commodity' and pressure of 'Community #Quote by Rishiraj Sen

#6. 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. #Quote by Amartya Sen

#7. The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti-Rev. Wright or, if Sen. Clinton wins, anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to fail. This model has already been tested with disastrous results. #Quote by Newt Gingrich

#8. Prayer simply means a longing of the heart, it is the wish felt, - it may be expressed, or not expressed. It may take the form of human language or it may never be uttered at all; still it is a prayer, if God only hears it in the secret recess of the heart. #Quote by Keshub Chandra Sen

#9. The absurdity of public-choice theory is captured by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in the following little scenario: "Can you direct me to the railway station?" asks the stranger. "Certainly," says the local, pointing in the opposite direction, towards the post office, "and would you post this letter for me on your way?" "Certainly," says the stranger, resolving to open it to see if it contains anything worth stealing. #Quote by Linda McQuaig

#10. Imparting education not only enlightens the receiver, but also broadens the giver - the teachers, the parents, the friends. #Quote by Amartya Sen

#11. Stand up, Chuck, let 'em see ya." –-Joe Biden, to Missouri state Sen. Chuck Graham, who is in a wheelchair, Columbia, Missouri, Sept. 12, 2008 #Quote by Joe Biden

#12. He wrote extensively on how schools should be made more attractive to boys and girls and thus more productive. His own co-educational school at Santiniketan had many progressive features. The emphasis here was on self-motivation rather than on discipline, and on fostering intellectual curiosity rather than competitive excellence. #Quote by Amartya Sen

#13. A new Republican Congress is taking over. Sen. Ted Cruz has been appointed tooverseeing NASA in Congress. He says he wants NASA to focus on finding aliens so he can deport them. #Quote by Conan O'Brien

#14. If the government is vulnerable to public opinion, then famines are a dreadfully bad thing to have. You can't win many elections after a famine, and you don't like being criticized by newspapers, opposition parties in parliament, and so on. Democracy gives the government an immediate political incentive to act. #Quote by Amartya Sen

#15. It took us 200 years to elect the first Democratic woman to the Senate in her own right, and that's Barbara Mikulski. Six years later, we had a grand slam: We elected four new Democratic women to the Senate. Sen. Mikulski now has some company. #Quote by Ellen Malcolm

#16. Education is the chief remedy for all those great evils which afflict the country. Education will not only cultivate and improve the intellect of the nation, but will also purify its character. #Quote by Keshub Chandra Sen

#17. You can't prevent undernourishment so easily, but famines you can stop with half an effort. Then the question was why don't the governments stop them? #Quote by Amartya Sen

#18. The notion of human right builds on our shared humanity. These rights are not derived from the citizenship of any country, or the membership of any nation, but are presumed to be claims or entitlements of every human being. They differ, therefore, from constitutionally created rights guaranteed for specific people. #Quote by Amartya Sen

#19. Ultimately, imperialism made even the British working classes suffer. This is a point which the British working classes found quite difficult to swallow, but they did, actually. #Quote by Amartya Sen

#20. To understand is difficult; to act is easy. #Quote by Sun Yat-sen

#21. [Speaking of Chinese president Sun Yat-sen] ... combined Benjamin Franklin and George Washington of China. #Quote by Calvin Coolidge

#22. If you think about it, candidate Obama, Sen. Obama, was running on sort of long-run economic issues, like restoring prosperity to the middle class, dealing with the perennial problem of health care in the United States. He talked a lot about the budget deficit, about the need to transition to clean energy. #Quote by Christina Romer

#23. Empowering women is key to building a future we want #Quote by Amartya Sen

#24. Laziness is a habit which makes you fall in the pit,
Lazy people don't act but prefer to sit,
They delay action with some excuse,
Laziness is of no use. #Quote by Ron Sen

#25. In your rare embrace, sometimes I am lost nowadays. In these years, you have changed. I have changed. Every single day, we're fighting our feuds silently; inventing devious ways to hurt one another. Our gazes keep to our feet: wavering, pirouetting and crisscrossing, so as to not stumble, even inadvertently, upon each other. Our windows look out at other windows looking in at us. Mynahs no longer come by in our balconies. Branches, not of a mango tree, but of a conglomerate, surround them instead. The silhouettes of concrete buildings sometimes shine in the rain's aftermath, but remain concrete. Today, as the Ganga rises and rages all over the city, people run for their lives, but I let it wash over my soul and flood my tears.'
('Left from Dhakeshwari') #Quote by Kunal Sen

#26. But once we recognize that many ideas that are taken to be quintessentially Western have also flourished in other civilizations, we also see that these ideas are not as culture-specific as is sometimes claimed. We need not begin with pessimism, at least on this ground, about the prospects of reasoned humanism in the world. #Quote by Amartya Sen

#27. To understand the world is never a matter of simply recording our immediate perceptions. Understanding inescapably involves reasoning.
We have to 'read' what we feel and seem to see, and ask what those perceptions indicate and how we may take them into account without being overwhelmed by them. One issue relates to the reliability of our feelings and impressions. A sense of injustice could serve as a signal that moves us, but a signal does demand critical examination, and there has to be some scrutiny of the soundness of a
conclusion based mainly on signals...We also have to ask what kinds of reasoning should count in the assessment of ethical and political concepts such as justice and injustice. #Quote by Amartya Sen

#28. Globalization is a complex issue, partly because economic globalization is only one part of it. Globalization is greater global closeness, and that is cultural, social, political, as well as economic. #Quote by Amartya Sen

#29. 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. ... a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have #Quote by Amartya Sen

#30. Sen. Obama is a decent person and a person you don't have to be scared of as president of the United States. #Quote by John McCain