Muhammad Yunus > Quotes

“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, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism

“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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“..things 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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“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

“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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“The fact that the poor are alive is clear proof of their ability.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“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

“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, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism

“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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“Poverty does not belong in civilized human society. Its proper place is in a museum. That's where it will be.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“Changes are products of intensive efforts.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“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

“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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World 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.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“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

“We are faced with famine in 1974 and people are dying of hunger. When people are dying of hunger, and you are a young economic teacher, teaching an elegant economic theory in the class room, it doesn't make you feel good. Because all your brilliant theories don't seem to, come into use of the people who dying. And it 's death you cannot explain because it's not cause of disease. ..it's just of not having food to eat...
So in the situation like that you have nothing but frustration and agony. So one way, I try to kind of enlightened my frustration and agony by coming to the conclusion that I may not be useful as an economist, but I'm still a basic human being. I can juts go out and stand next to human being. And see if there's anything I can do to another person. Even for a day if it is help, pay for more a day, I feel more a little bit better. So that's why I started going outside the campus..

I thought if you can become an angel for 27 dollars, it would be fun to do more of it ”
― Muhammad Yunus

“In the United States I saw how the market liberates the individual and allows people to be free to make personal choices. But the biggest drawback was that the market always pushes things to the side of the powerful. I thought the poor should be able to take advantage of the system in order to improve their lot.
Grameen is a private-sector self-help bank, and as its members gain personal wealth they acquire water-pumps, latrines, housing, education, access to health care, and so on.
Another way to achieve this is to let abusiness earn profit that is then txed by the government, and the tax can be used to provide services to the poor. But in practice it never works that way. In real life, taxes only pay for a government bureaucracy that collects the tax and provides little or nothing to the poor. And since most government bureaucracies are not profit motivated, they have little incentive to increase their efficiency. In fact, they have a disincentive: governments often cannot cut social services without a public outcry, so the behemoth continues, blind and inefficient, year after year.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“I learned that things are never as complicated as we imagine them to be. It is only our arrogance which seeks to find complicated answers to simple problems.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“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

“When you can hold the world in your palm and see it from a bird’s eye view, you tend to become arrogant – you do not realize that when looking from such a great distance, everything becomes blurred, and that you end up imagining rather than really seeing things.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: The Story of the Grameen Bank

“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, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty