Muhammad Yunus famous quotes

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

#Morning #Jobs #People

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

#Frustration #Rights #Poverty

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

#Grandchildren #Museums #One Day

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Business #Museums #Luxury

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Country #Stupid #People

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Fun #People #Entrepreneur

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Mother #Dream #Children

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

#People #Poverty #Credit

Poverty is unnecessary.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Poverty #Unnecessary #Finance

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, is a wonderful creation. But many people never get a chance to explore that, never, no that she nor he has that
-- Muhammad Yunus

#People #Use #Want

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

#Oneness #Diversity #Together

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

#Inspiration #People #Charity

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

#Alive #Facts #Poor

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Creativity #Keys #Problem

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Giving Up #Limits

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Real #Giving #People

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Flower #Perfect #People

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Gambling #People #Population

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

#Museums #Poverty #Doe

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Believe #People #World

All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves we were all self-employed . . . finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where human history began . . . As civilization came we suppressed it. We became labor because they stamped us, ‘You are labor.’ We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Self #Civilization #Entrepreneur

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Country #Teaching #People

The moment you say microfinance everybody wants to help you.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Want #Helping #Moments

Truly affordable but high-quality health care tools and services are the only means by which quality health care can be provided to all.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Mean #Quality #Care

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Opportunity #People #Support

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Change #Faith #Eye

Human beings are much bigger than just making money.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Making Money #Bigger #Humans

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Goodbye #Moon #Technology

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Conflict #Sometimes #Absence

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.'
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Expression #Selfishness #World

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#People #Healthy #Trying

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

#Want #Imagine

Changes are products of intensive efforts.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Effort

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Jobs #Poverty #Life Is

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

#Thinking #People #Lazy

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

#Opportunity #People #Entrepreneur

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Believe #Creativity #Past

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Money #Ideas #People

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!
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Inspirational #Encouragement #Opportunity

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

#Thinking #Creating #Poverty

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Meaningful #Creativity #Challenges

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Responsibility #Worry #Use

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Jobs #Thinking #Careers

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Real #Impact #Entrepreneur

The only place where poverty should be is in museums.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Museums #Poverty #Should

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Greatness #Would Be #Bigs

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

#Poverty #Charity #Rich

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Community #Important #Poverty

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Islands #Levels #Should

The crisis is the price for the capitalist system
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Crisis #Capitalist

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

#Fun #World #Changing The World

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Powerful #Distance #Issues

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Rights #Credit #Poverty

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Inspirational #Opportunity #People

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Ideas #People #Different

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

#Children #Home #Men

What good does the theory [of economics] do if it is not working for people?
-- Muhammad Yunus

#People #Poverty #Doe

...a culture that holds people back should and can be changed...
-- Muhammad Yunus

#People #Poverty #Culture

... 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 ...
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Strong #Tiny #Poverty

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

#Focus #Credit #Poverty

...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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Two #People #Useless

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Government #Hands #Giving

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?
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Business #Issues #Saving

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
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Real #Income #Levels

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

#Inspiring #Jobs #Thinking

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

#Poverty #Charity #Initiative

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Children #Husband #Sacrifice

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Poverty #Belief #Making Money

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

#Couple #Years #Phones

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

#People #Support #Poverty

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Money #Giving #People

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Water #Definitions #Poverty

In this world of plenty, a tiny baby, who does not yet understand the mystery of the world, is allowed to cry and cry and finally fall asleep without the milk she needs to survive.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Baby #Fall #Needs

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Roots #Pieces #Bricks

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

#Poverty #Calling #Kind

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

#Thinking #Done #Poverty

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Poverty #Done #Problem

The current financial crisis makes it very clears that the system that we have isn't really working, and this is the right time for us to undo things and build them in a new way.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Way #Poverty #Financial

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Joy #Choices #World

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Positive #Believe #Museums

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

#Technology #Islands #Isolation

Th direct elimination of elimination of poverty should be the objective of all development aid. Development should be viewed as a human rights issue, not as a question of simply increasing the gross national product (GNP).
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Issues #Rights #Development

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#Creativity #People #Needs

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

#Charity #Dollars #Social

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.
-- Muhammad Yunus

#People #Quality #Demand