Muhammad Yunus Quotes

When tiny, tiny things start happening a million times, it becomes a large thing. It lays down the foundation of a strong economic base. With women participating in building this economic base, it becomes the foundation for better social and economic future.

Long live Grameen Bank. Let the power of poor women prevail.

Capitalism is not about the profit motive. Capitalism is about free markets. What you do in the market, in your free will, is the essence of capitalism.

Health care can be made more affordable for the poor without requiring major new scientific developments, just the smart application of current technologies. We have seen a $25 incubator and diagnostic instruments that are built tough, cheap, and reusable for the developing world.

Microcredit has shown how you can reach out to people that conventional banking cannot. It has demonstrated that it's a doable proposition.

All human beings are born entrepreneurs. Some get a chance to unleash that capacity. Some never got the chance, never knew that he or she has that capacity.

I wanted to give money to people like this woman so that they would be free from the moneylenders to sell their product at the price which the markets gave them — which was much higher than what the trader was giving them.

Poverty is not created by poor people. It is produced by our failure to create institutions to support human capabilities.

The profit orientation is only one orientation of a person. The same people who are interested in profit-making are also selfless. I am not saying that capitalist theory is wrong. I am saying that it has not been interpreted and practiced fully.

It's very difficult to look at it in a kind of a free manner, what reality is. That was my first struggle, to see it as it is, rather than tainted by my own previous thoughts.

I should never seek a job in my life, my mission in life is to create jobs. I am not a job seeker, I am a job giver.

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.

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

Human beings are much bigger than just making money.

I will not spend the money for myself. I will rather spend it in special business on a no-profit-no-loss policy. We will also establish an eye hospital where even beggars will be given treatment at the cost of Taka 10-20.

So i say, change the base! If you change the base, anybody will be as tall as anybody else! My belief is poverty is not caused by poor ppl. Poverty is caused by the system. Poverty is caused by the policies that we pursue.

We certainly noted that when given the opportunity, women handle money more efficiently. They have long term vision, they manage money more carefully. Men are more callous with money. Their first reflex is to blow it by getting drunk in a pub, or on prostitutes or gambling. Women, on the other hand, are endowed with a tremendous sense of self-sacrifice and try to get the best out of the money, for their children, but also for their husbands.

Making money is a happiness. And that's a great incentive. Making other people happy is a super-happiness.

They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy.

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.

There are cultural issues everywhere - in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences.

The oneness of human beings is the basic ethical thread that holds us together.

Capitalism has been interpreted as an exclusively profit-centric human engagement. Some have been saying to bring people and planet into the picture. This can be a good change, but it is still not fully operationalized. Are you putting people, planet and profit at the same level?

Today, the concept of business is to make money. Making money is the name of the business.

We can remove poverty from the surface of the earth only if we can redesign our institutions - like the banking institutions, and other institutions; if we redesign our policies, if we look back on our concepts, so that we have a different idea of poor people.

We have to get out of this mindset that the rich will do the business and the poor will have the charity.

If we want to help poor people out, one way to do that is to help them explore and use their own capability. Human being is full of capacity, full of capability, it's a wonderful creation, but many people never get a chance to explore that, never know that she or he has that.

Human beings have enormous resilience.

I’m encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.

We have a list of human rights - right to food, right to shelter, right to health, right to education, many such items which are considered and accepted as bill of rights. These are to be insured to people. So all nations, all societies try to do that.

I made a list of people who needed just a little bit of money. And when the list was complete, there were 42 names. The total amount of money they needed was $27. I was shocked.

The only place where poverty should be is in museums.

Business money is limitless.

When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.

I said peace is sometimes narrowly interpreted; it's the absence of conflict between nations or something. But peace is more inherent, more basic to human life, human beings, what we feel about each other, what we feel about life around us and what we see in our future.

A culture that holds people back should and can be changed.

Credit is a human right that should be treated as a human right. If credit can be accepted as a human right, then all other human rights will be easier to establish.

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.

Young people should think in a different way - they should be job givers not job seeker.

If you think creating a world without any poverty is impossible, let's do it. Because it is the right thing to do.

...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.

I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation.

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.

UN studies conducted in more than forty developing countries show that the birth rate falls as women gain equality... I believe income-earning opportunities that empower poor women ... will have more impact on curbing population growth that the current system of "encouraging" family planning practices through intimidation tactics.. Family planning should be left to the family.

In the future the question will not be, "Are people credit-worthy", but rather, "Are banks people-worthy?"

If you want to do something you have to imagine it. If you don’t imagine it, it will never happen

Grameen Bank was formed as an institution owned by its borrower members, who are poor women. Through its unique decision-making process, Grameen Bank has given millions of women the means to emerge from the shadows in a male-dominated society and to make something of themselves.

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.