Muhammad Yunus Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Poverty is unnecessary.

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 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.

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.

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

Human beings have enormous resilience.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Human beings are much bigger than just making money.

The only place where poverty should be is in museums.

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.

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.

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

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

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

...poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone.

The moment you say microfinance everybody wants to help you.

I made a list of people who needed just a little bit of money. And when the list was complete, there were 42 names. The total amount of money they needed was $27. I was shocked.

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

Changes are products of intensive efforts.

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!

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.

They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy.