Quotes by 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.

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.

In the world of development, if one mixes the poor and the nonpoor in a program, the nonpoor will always drive out the poor, and the less poor will drive out the more poor, unless protective measures are instituted right at the beginning.  In such cases, the nonpoor reap the benefits of all that is done in the name of the poor.

Poor ppl are a like bonsai tree, a little tree.  You pick the seed of the tallest tree in the forest and take the best seed out of it, and plant it in a flower pot.  You get a tiny little tree, we call it a bonsai.  Nothing wrong with the seed, you've got the best seed possible.  Nothing wrong with the tree, because you actually picked the tallest tree in the forest.  But actually it grows this far... why?  Because we put them in the flower pot.  The base.  Society is the base.  And society is so stingy it doesn't give the poor ppl the space to grow.

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.

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?

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.

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.

The one message that we are trying to promote all the time, that poverty in the world is an artificial creation. It doesn't belong to human civilization, and we can change that, we can make people come out of poverty and have the real state of affairs. So the only thing we have to do is to redesign our institutions and policies, and there will be no people who will be suffering from poverty. So I would hope that this award will make this message heard many times, and in a kind of forceful way, so that people start believing that we can create a poverty-free world. That's what I would like to do.

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