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

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.

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

An individual poor person is an isolated island by himself and herself. IT can end that isolation overnight.

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.

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.

What is entrepreneurship, after all? Bigness is not the issue. Poor people are the ones who take challenges every day. The guy who sells a hot dog on the street is as much an entrepreneur as anyone else. Getting his $50 loan to start could be as difficult as finding $50 million for someone else. All people are entrepreneurs.