When you get a mobile phone it is almost like having a card to get you out of poverty in a couple of years.

We got rid of colonialism, we got rid of slavery, and we got rid of apartheid everyone thought each one of them was impossible. Let's take the next impossible, do it with joy and get it finished with and create a world free from poverty. Let us create the world of our choice.

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.

I have come to believe, deeply and firmly, that we can create a poverty free world if we want to. I came to this conclusion not as a product of a pious dream, but as a concrete result of experience gained in the work of the Grameen Bank.

I was an economist now turning into a human being - as if these are two different things. I don't know but I did that and then I had no vision.

Business money is limitless.

...poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone.