Unprecedented technological capabilities combined with unlimited human creativity have given us tremendous power to take on intractable problems like poverty, unemployment, disease, and environmental degradation. Our challenge is to translate this extraordinary potential into meaningful change.

In a bird's eye view you tend to survey everything and decide on a particular point, then you swoop down and pick it up. In a worms eye view you don't have that advantage of looking at everything.

...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.

In the world of development, if one mixes the poor and the nonpoor in a program, the nonpoor will always drive out the poor, and the less poor will drive out the more poor, unless protective measures are instituted right at the beginning. In such cases, the nonpoor reap the benefits of all that is done in the name of the poor.

Human beings have enormous resilience.

Money begets money. If you don't have that, you wait around to be hired by somebody at the mercy of others. If you have that money in your hand, you desperately try to make the best use of it and move ahead. And that's generating income for yourself.

The challenge I set before anyone who condemns private-sector business is this: If you are a socially conscious person, why don't you run your business in a way that will help achieve social objectives?