Muhammad Yunus Quotes

The crisis is the price for the capitalist system

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

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

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

Capitalism is not about the profit motive. Capitalism is about free markets. What you do in the market, in your free will, is the essence of capitalism.

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.

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

The developing world is full of entrepreneurs and visionaries, who with access to education, equity and credit would play a key role in developing the economic situations in their countries.

Truly affordable but high-quality health care tools and services are the only means by which quality health care can be provided to all.

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.

...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.

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.

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.

What good does the theory [of economics] do if it is not working for people?

An individual poor person is an isolated island by himself and herself. IT can end that isolation overnight.

I have always said that human beings are multidimensional beings. Their happiness comes from many sources, not, as our current economic framework assumes, just from making money.

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.

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.

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

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.

I had only immediate things today, only today, not tomorrow. I don't know what will happen tomorrow. Today I can see myself like crystal.

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

Women have plans for themselves, for their children, about their home, the meals. They have a Vision. A man wants to enjoy himself.

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

If we are looking for one single action which will enable the poor to overcome their poverty, I would focus on credit

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

Poor people always pay back their loans. [...] It is us, the designers of institutions and rules, who keep creating trouble for them.

Nothing is more valuable to people than health care, and by paying, they feel less like beggars and more like 'customers' who can and should demand quality care.

Business money is limitless.

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

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.

When you get a mobile phone it is almost like having a card to get you out of poverty in a couple of years.

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.

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.

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.

While technology is important, it's what we do with it that truly matters.