Top 171 Quotes & Sayings by Muhammad Yunus - Page 2

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.

I believe terrorism cannot be won over by military action. Terrorism must be condemned in the strongest language. We must stand solidly against it, and find all the means to end it. We must address the root causes of terrorism to end it for all time to come.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Changes are products of intensive efforts.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

...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.

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.

The only place where poverty should be is in museums.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

The crisis is the price for the capitalist system

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

...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.

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.

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.