The process of breaking down fear was always my greatest challenge and it was made easier by the careful work and gentle voices of my female workers.

Instead of concentrating on the war against poverty, global attention is focused on another kind of slaughter - on something that is intangible and yet being tackled by all the possible military means we can muster. And all the lofty declarations by world leaders about combatting poverty that were lauded by the General Assembly turned out to be damp squibs.

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.

Poor people always pay back their loans. [...] It is us, the designers of institutions and rules, who keep creating trouble for them.

I'm on the faculty. I teach. And it's not easy for a poor person to enter the campus to track down the professor in the campus in a Bangladesh situation. They all will be stopped at the gate. You have no business in the university!

We prepare our students for jobs and careers, but we don't teach them to think as individuals about what kind of world they would create.

Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.