Poverty is unnecessary.

If the basic structure of Grameen is changed, the worry is that the poor women who are the rightful owners of the bank will be disenfranchised.

We believe that poverty does not belong in a civilized human society. It belongs in museums [...] A poverty-free world might not be perfect, but it would be the best approximation of the ideal.

A university should not be an island where academics attain higher and higher levels of knowledge without sharing any of this knowledge with its neighbours.

The new millennium began with a great global dream. World leaders gathered at the United Nations in 2000 and adopted, among others, a historic goal to reduce poverty by half by 2015. Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world in one voice, one that specified time and size.

Changes are products of intensive efforts.

We create institutions and policies on the basis of the way we make assumptions about us and others. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us. So we have had poor people around us. If we had believed that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have created appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world.