Yunus Quotes & Sayings

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

The earth shall be left to no one. — Yunus Emre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

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

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

If I told you about a land of love ... would you swallow it as a remedy? — Yunus Emre

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

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

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

Whatever separates you from the Truth, throw it away, it will vanish anyhow ... — Yunus Emre

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

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

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

Money commands everything because that's our interpretation of capitalism ... what kind of world is that? It's a very uncomfortable interpretation of a human being. We have been turned into robots. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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

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

I am the drop that contains the ocean — Yunus Emre

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

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

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. — 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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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. — 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

I was born in 1940 in Hathazari, Chittagong, which is now part of Bangladesh. Education was always important to my parents, and with what little we had, they were able to provide an education for their children. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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

Too many words are lit for a beast of burden. — Yunus Emre

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

Come let us be friends for once. Let us make life easy on us. Let us be loved ones and lovers. The earth shall be left to no one. — Yunus Emre

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

A heart makes a good home for the friend. — Yunus Emre

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

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

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

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

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

Thought is an errand boy, fear a mine of worries. — Yunus Emre

Human beings have enormous resilience. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

If I told you about a land of love, friend, would you follow me and come? — Yunus Emre

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

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

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. — 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

I began my career as an economics professor but became frustrated because the economic theories I taught in the classroom didn't have any meaning in the lives of poor people I saw all around me. I decided to turn away from the textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person's existence. — Muhammad Yunus

We have designed a capitalist system wrong. We assume human beings are one-dimensional, all they do is make money, so we've created a money-centric world. — 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

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. — Muhammad Yunus

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

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

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 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

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. — 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

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

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

Poverty is unnecessary. — Muhammad Yunus

The Book of Wisdom. Simab said: 'I shall sell the Book of Wisdom for a hundred gold pieces, and some people will say that it is cheap.' Yunus Marmar said to him: 'And I shall give away the key to understanding it, and almost none shall take it, even free of charge. — Idries Shah

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

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

I strongly believe that we can create a poverty-free world, if we want to ... In that kind of world, [the] only place you can see poverty is in the museum. When school children will be on a tour of the poverty museum, they will be horrified to see the misery and indignity of human beings. They will blame their forefathers for tolerating this inhuman condition to continue in a massive way. — Muhammad Yunus