I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.

Th direct elimination of elimination of poverty should be the objective of all development aid. Development should be viewed as a human rights issue, not as a question of simply increasing the gross national product (GNP).

The current financial crisis makes it very clears that the system that we have isn't really working, and this is the right time for us to undo things and build them in a new way.

All people are entrepreneurs, but many don't have the opportunity to find that out.

This is not charity. This is business: business with a social objective, which is to help people get out of poverty.

I had no idea that I would ever get involved with something like lending money to poor people, given the circumstances in which I was working in Bangladesh.

...one cannot but wonder how an environment can make people despair and sit idle and then, by changing the conditions, one can transform the same people into matchless performers.