Muhammad Yunus Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — Muhammad Yunus

When you say vision you have a track that this is what I would like to say. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

The Grameen clinics prove that a medical system 'for the poor' can be almost entirely self-supporting, and we hope we can make it fully self sufficient so we can expand it across Bangladesh. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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

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

What we need is to think strategically about development, analyzing a country's potential role in its region and the world in search of opportunities for growth. Platforms like the Global Social Business Summit can facilitate the process on bringing about change. — Muhammad Yunus

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

I began my work in the '70s, teaching at a university in Bangladesh, and these economic theories that I had learned stopped ringing true for me, as I saw the misery of people living all around me. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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

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

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

Poverty is an artificial, external imposition on a human being; it is not innate in a human being. And since it is external, it can be removed. It is just a question of doing it. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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

Business money is limitless. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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

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

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

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

Business is a very beautiful mechanism to solve problems, but we never use it for that purpose. We only use it to make money. It satisfies our selfish interest but not our collective interest. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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? — Muhammad Yunus

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

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

Changes are products of intensive efforts. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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

What I learned in school, what I learned in the educational part of my life. Trying to acquire a kind of a bird's eye view. You drive hard and see everything. And that's called education because now you can see everything. — Muhammad Yunus

The system we have built refuses to recognize people. Only credit cards are recognized. Drivers' licenses are recognized. But not people. People haven't any use for faces anymore, it seems. They are busy looking at your credit card, your driver's licence, your social security number. If a driver's licence is more reliable than the face I wear, then why do I have a face? — Muhammad Yunus

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

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? — Muhammad Yunus

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

Access to quality education has enabled me to reach far beyond the Bangladeshi village I grew up in. — Muhammad Yunus

Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society. For building stable peace we must find ways to provide opportunities for people to live decent lives. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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

Poverty is unnecessary. — Muhammad Yunus

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

I profoundly believer, as Grammen's experience over twenty years has shown, that personal gains is not the only possible fuel for free enterprise. Social goals can replace greed as a powerful motivational force. Social-consciousness-driven enterprises can be formidable competitors for the greed-based enterprises. I believe that if we play our cards right, social-consciousness-driven enterprises can do very well in the marketplace. — Muhammad Yunus

By the time the war was over, Bangladesh was a devastated country. The economy was shattered. Millions of people needed to be rehabilitated. I knew that I had to return home and participate in the work of nation building. I thought I owed it to myself. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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

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

We will make yogurt with all kinds of nutritious elements. We want to provide nutrition to the poor and children. — Muhammad Yunus

Credit markets were originally created to serve human needs; to provide businesses and individuals with capital to start or expand businesses or fulfill other financial needs. — Muhammad Yunus

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

Poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone. — Muhammad Yunus

I believe that the emphasis on curbing population growth diverts attention from the more vital issue of pursuing policies that allow the population to take care of itself. — Muhammad Yunus

Good economic theory must give the people the chance to use their talents to build their own lives. We must get away from the traditional route where the rich will do the business and the poor will depend on private or public charity. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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

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

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

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