Muhammad yunus quotes

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

There is the expression of selfishness and there is the expression of selflessness - but economists or theoreticians never touched that part. They said: 'Go and become a philanthropist.' I said, 'No, I can do that in the business world, create a different kind of business - a business based on selflessness.'

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.

Human creativity is unlimited. It is the capacity of humans to make things happen which didn't happen before. Creativity provides the key to solving our social and economic problems.

Here we were talking about economic development, about investing billions of dollars in various programs, and I could see it wasn't billions of dollars people needed right away.

Changes are products of intensive efforts.

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

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on.

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

It's very difficult when you have learned something a certain way. Not only your mind absorbs it; your eyes also are trained to see in a certain way because eyes are only as good as you've been trained to see.

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.

Like navigation markings in unknown waters, definitions of poverty need to be distinctive and unambiguous. A definition that is not precise is as bad as no definition at all.

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

Policies are also to blame: the only thing that the governments and people can come up with to give to the poor people is charity. Poor people get hand outs from the state. But this is not a solution to poverty.

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

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.

..things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.

To overcome poverty and the flaws of the economic crisis in our society, we need to envision our social life. We have to free our mind, imagine what has never happened before and write social fiction. We need to imagine things to make them happen. If you don't imagine, it will never happen.

By simply capitalizing on core strengths and knowledge, companies and entrepreneurs can engage in an emerging business model that will enable them to create - and demonstrate - real, sustainable social impact in society.

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.

Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong in their seeds. Simply, society never gave them the base to grow on. All it needs to get the poor people out of poverty for us to create an enabling environment for them. Once the poor can unleash their energy and creativity, poverty will disappear very quickly.

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?

People need such a small amount of money to deal with their own daily life. Because wherever I went to school they taught me about millions of dollars. I dealt with billions of dollars in national plans and investment plans and so on. Not this tiny money, $27 for 42 people.

In my experience, poor people are the world's greatest entrepreneurs. Every day, they must innovate in order to survive. They remain poor because they do not have the opportunities to turn their creativity into sustainable income.

Even today we don't pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor worked harder, they wouldn't be poor.

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.

All human beings are very creative - full of potential, full of energy... So, money kind of allows them to express it... And if you're successful, you can take more money. You can expand your capacity, reach next level of capacity, and so on.

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.

I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.

A charity dollar has only one life; a Social Business dollar can be invested over and over again.

...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.

If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty.

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.

The challenge I set before anyone who condemns private-sector business is this: If you are a socially conscious person, why don't you run your business in a way that will help achieve social objectives?

I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family, there's lots of children, seven brothers, two sisters grew up together, fighting with each other, went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family.

The crisis is the price for the capitalist system

Human beings are much bigger than just making money.

Nothing is more valuable to people than health care, and by paying, they feel less like beggars and more like 'customers' who can and should demand quality care.

Some people think that poor people are lazy. Actually, it takes a lot of work to survive when you are dirt-poor.

When a destitute mother starts earning an income, her dreams of success invariably center around her children. A woman's second priority is the household. She wants to buy utensils, build a stronger roof, or find a bed for herself and her family. A man has an entirely different set of priorities. When a destitute father earns extra income, he focuses more attention on himself. Thus money entering a household through a woman brings more benefits to the family as a whole.

We have done some of these in Bangladesh. Whenever I see a problem, I immediately go and create a company. That's what I did all my life.

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

Peace should be understood in a human way - in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights.

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.

Business is about problem-solving, but it does not always have to be about maximizing profit. When I went into business, my interest was to figure out how to solve problems I see in front of me. That's why I looked at the poverty issue. I got involved in lots of things to address it, and one of them was money lending with loans and credits and savings accounts, and in the process I created Grameen Bank. So you can also have social objectives. Ask yourself these questions: Who are you? What kind of world do you want?

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.

All people are entrepreneurs, but many don't have the opportunity to find that out.

The fact that the poor are alive is clear proof of their ability.

If we are looking for one single action which will enable the poor to overcome their poverty, I would focus on credit

If we are looking for one single action which will enable the poor to overcome their poverty, I would go for credit. Money is power. I have been arguing that credit should be accepted as a human right. If we can come up with a system which allows everybody access to credit while ensuring excellent repayment - I can give you a guarantee that poverty will not last long.

I believe that "government", as we know it today, should pull out of most things except for law enforcement and justice, national defense and foreign policy, and let the private sector, a "Grameenized private sector", a social-consciousness-driven private sector, take over their other functions.

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 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.

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.

Poverty does not belong in civilized human society. Its proper place is in a museum. That's where it will be.

We developed microfinance to fight loan sharks - I was telling people don't go to loan sharks - not trying to take advantage and make money for myself. I would be a junior loan shark if I did ... It is not a panacea.

...culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.

If I could be useful to another human being, even for a day, that would be a great thing. It would be greater than all the big thoughts I could have at the university.

I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social systems that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make up that system; the policies that we pursue.

Each of us has much more hidden inside us than we have had a chance to explore. Unless we create an environment that enables us to discover the limits of our potential, we will never know what we have inside of us.

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.

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.

If the helplessness and isolation of labour, who have nothing to sell but their labour, can be totally removed by connecting labour with capital through a universal credit system, we'll then have other kinds of actors on the economic scene different from what the existing capitalist world would allow us to bring out.

What we are trying to do is to create a social business in Bangladesh, a joint venture to create restaurants for common people. Good, healthy food at affordable prices so that people don't have to opt for food that is unhealthy and unhygienic.

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.

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.

People.. were poor not because they were stupid or lazy. They worked all day long, doing complex physical tasks. They were poor because the financial institution in the country did not help them widen their economic base.

Hunger is the worst form of deprivation of a human being. Although inability to access food is the immediate cause of hunger, the real cause in most of the incidents of hunger is lack of ability to pay for food. If we are looking for ways to end hunger then we should be looking at ways to ensure a reasonable level of income for all

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.

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.

My experience working in the Grameen Bank has given me faith; an unshakable faith in the creativity of human beings. It leads me to believe that humans are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty. They suffer now as they did in the past because we turn our heads away from this issue.

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.

I was trained to become an economist and I finished my work and I was teaching and did my PhD so I thought I did that. I prepared myself for that kind of road. But then I realized that I had not learned enough to solve the problem of poverty. So I distanced myself from the things that I learned and tried to learn anew about people.

Soon we saw that money going to women brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men. So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a result, now 96% of our four million borrowers in Grameen Bank are women.

But we have created a society that does not allow opportunities for those people to take care of themselves because we have denied them those opportunities.

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.

Each individual person is very important. Each person has tremendous potential. She or he alone can influence the lives of others within the communities, nations, within and beyond her or his own time.

The developing world is full of entrepreneurs and visionaries, who with access to education, equity and credit would play a key role in developing the economic situations in their countries.

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.

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 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.

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

Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world - out of six billion people, more than three billion - do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame.

I think, social business is the most logical thing to do. If we had done that, we could reduce all the problems we have.

Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.

I avoid grandiose plans. I start with a small piece that I can do. I go to the root of the problem and then work around it. It's building brick by brick.

What I did not know yet about hunger, but would find out over the next twenty-one years, was that brilliant theorists of economics do not find it worthwhile to spend time discussing issues of poverty and hunger. They believe that these will be resolved when general economic prosperity increases. These economists spend all their talents detailing the process of development and prosperity, but rarely reflect on the origin and development of poverty and hunger. A a result, poverty continues.

People can change their own lives, provided they have the right kind of institutional support. They're not asking for charity, charity is no solution to poverty. Poverty is the creation of opportunities like everybody else has, not the poor people, so bring them to the poor people, so that they can change their lives.

Engaging in social business is beneficial to a company because it leverages on business competencies to address social issues, involves one-time investment with sustainable results, and produces other positive effects such as employee motivation and improved organizational culture.

Women have plans for themselves, for their children, about their home, the meals. They have a Vision. A man wants to enjoy himself.

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.

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 a bird's eye view you tend to survey everything and decide on a particular point, then you swoop down and pick it up. In a worms eye view you don't have that advantage of looking at everything.

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

The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world. All we have to do is to free them from the chains that we have put around them!

People should wake up in the morning and say 'I am not a job seeker, I am a job-creator.

I did something that challenged the banking world. Conventional banks look for the rich; we look for the absolutely poor. All people are entrepreneurs, but many don't have the opportunity to find that out.

The Grameen Bank Ordinance with amendments up to 2008 is a beautiful legal structure for the fulfillment of the ideals and objectives of the bank. Any change in this structure will be devastating for the bank.

Once poverty is gone, we'll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They'll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society - how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair.

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.

Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor.

The essence of capitalism is expressed in two of its basic features: a) profit maximization and b) market competition. In their abstract formulations none of them was supposed to have anything conspiratorial against the poor. But in real life they turn out to be the "killers" of the poor - by making rich the richer and poor the poorer.

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.

I'm finding that knocking at their mindsets is hard work. A simple knock will not make it crawl. I was trying to push it. I was trying to find a bird's eye view where I could find a big solution. So this is what I was trying.

One day our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like.

Unprecedented technological capabilities combined with unlimited human creativity have given us tremendous power to take on intractable problems like poverty, unemployment, disease, and environmental degradation. Our challenge is to translate this extraordinary potential into meaningful change.

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.

I founded Grameen Bank to provide loans to those considered traditionally unbankable. Grameen Bank works with the poorest and often illiterate, providing uncollateralized micro-loans for tiny business enterprises by which they can lift themselves and their families out of poverty.

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

The able bodied poor don't want or need charity.... All they need is financial capital.

Poverty is unnecessary.

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

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

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

I am proposing to create another kind of business, based on "selflessness" that is in all of us. I am calling it social business.

My vision for the future? Two things: to make credit a human right so that each individual human being will have the opportunity to take loans and implement his or her ideas so that self-exploration becomes possible. And second: that it will lead to a world where nobody has to suffer from poverty - a world completely free from poverty.

They said, we have education, but what about jobs? So I started telling them, you should be taking a pledge, and the pledge should be: 'I'm not a job seeker; I'm a job giver.' Prepare yourself to be a job giver.

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.

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.

The only place where poverty should be is in museums.

My vision for the future? ... a world completely free from poverty.

Human beings have enormous resilience.

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

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.

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.