Top 100 Muhammad Yunus Quotes
#1. Young people should think in a different way - they should be job givers not job seeker.
Muhammad Yunus
#2. What we need is to think strategically about development, analyzing a country's potential role in its region and the world in search of opportunities for growth. Platforms like the Global Social Business Summit can facilitate the process on bringing about change.
Muhammad Yunus
#3. 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
#4. One day our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like.
Muhammad Yunus
#5. If you want to do something you have to imagine it. If you don't imagine it, it will never happen
Muhammad Yunus
#6. Long live Grameen Bank. Let the power of poor women prevail.
Muhammad Yunus
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy.
Muhammad Yunus
#13. The only place where poverty should be is in museums.
Muhammad Yunus
#14. 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
#15. Poverty is an artificial, external imposition on a human being; it is not innate in a human being. And since it is external, it can be removed. It is just a question of doing it.
Muhammad Yunus
#16. 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.
Muhammad Yunus
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. This is not charity. This is business: business with a social objective, which is to help people get out of poverty.
Muhammad Yunus
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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.
Muhammad Yunus
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. While technology is important, it's what we do with it that truly matters.
Muhammad Yunus
#30. Access to quality education has enabled me to reach far beyond the Bangladeshi village I grew up in.
Muhammad Yunus
#31. 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
#32. 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
#34. 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
#35. I'm on the faculty. I teach. And it's not easy for a poor person to enter the campus to track down the professor in the campus in a Bangladesh situation. They all will be stopped at the gate. You have no business in the university!
Muhammad Yunus
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. I will not spend the money for myself. I will rather spend it in special business on a no-profit-no-loss policy. We will also establish an eye hospital where even beggars will be given treatment at the cost of Taka 10-20.
Muhammad Yunus
#40. My vision for the future? ... a world completely free from poverty.
Muhammad Yunus
#41. 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
#42. A charity dollar has only one life; a Social Business dollar can be invested over and over again.
Muhammad Yunus
#43. Each individual person is very important. Each person has tremendous potential. She or he alone can influence the lives of others within the communities, nations, within and beyond her or his own time.
Muhammad Yunus
#44. All people are entrepreneurs, but many don't have the opportunity to find that out.
Muhammad Yunus
#45. 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
#46. We have a list of human rights - right to food, right to shelter, right to health, right to education, many such items which are considered and accepted as bill of rights. These are to be insured to people. So all nations, all societies try to do that.
Muhammad Yunus
#47. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor.
Muhammad Yunus
#48. 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
#49. What we are trying to do is to create a social business in Bangladesh, a joint venture to create restaurants for common people. Good, healthy food at affordable prices so that people don't have to opt for food that is unhealthy and unhygienic.
Muhammad Yunus
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.
Muhammad Yunus
#53. Women have plans for themselves, for their children, about their home, the meals. They have a Vision. A man wants to enjoy himself ...
Muhammad Yunus
#54. 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
#55. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Today, the concept of business is to make money. Making money is the name of the business.
Muhammad Yunus
#60. 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
#61. In the future the question will not be, "Are people credit-worthy", but rather, "Are banks people-worthy?"
Muhammad Yunus
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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.
Muhammad Yunus
#65. 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.
Muhammad Yunus
#66. Making money is a happiness. And that's a great incentive. Making other people happy is a super-happiness.
Muhammad Yunus
#67. We will make yogurt with all kinds of nutritious elements. We want to provide nutrition to the poor and children.
Muhammad Yunus
#68. 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
#69. 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.
Muhammad Yunus
#70. Hings 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
#71. When you say vision you have a track that this is what I would like to say.
Muhammad Yunus
#72. Poor people always pay back their loans. It's us, the creators of institutions and rules, who keep creating trouble for them.
Muhammad Yunus
#73. A culture that holds people back should and can be changed ...
Muhammad Yunus
#74. I am proposing to create another kind of business, based on "selflessness" that is in all of us. I am calling it social business.
Muhammad Yunus
#75. 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
#76. 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.
Muhammad Yunus
#77. I believe that "government", as we know it today, should pull out of most things except for law enforcement and justice, national defense and foreign policy, and let the private sector, a "Grameenized private sector", a social-consciousness-driven private sector, take over their other functions.
Muhammad Yunus
#78. 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
#79. Microcredit has shown how you can reach out to people that conventional banking cannot. It has demonstrated that it's a doable proposition.
Muhammad Yunus
#80. Policies are also to blame: the only thing that the governments and people can come up with to give to the poor people is charity. Poor people get hand outs from the state. But this is not a solution to poverty.
Muhammad Yunus
#81. My experience working in the Grameen Bank has given me faith; an unshakable faith in the creativity of human beings. It leads me to believe that humans are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty. They suffer now as they did in the past because we turn our heads away from this issue.
Muhammad Yunus
#82. 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
#83. We have to get out of this mindset that the rich will do the business and the poor will have the charity.
Muhammad Yunus
#84. Poverty is not created by poor people. It is produced by our failure to create institutions to support human capabilities.
Muhammad Yunus
#85. What good does the theory [of economics] do if it is not working for people?
Muhammad Yunus
#86. The oneness of human beings is the basic ethical thread that holds us together.
Muhammad Yunus
#87. Poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone.
Muhammad Yunus
#88. 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
#89. The able bodied poor don't want or need charity ... All they need is financial capital.
Muhammad Yunus
#90. Business is a very beautiful mechanism to solve problems, but we never use it for that purpose. We only use it to make money. It satisfies our selfish interest but not our collective interest.
Muhammad Yunus
#91. 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
#92. 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.
Muhammad Yunus
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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.
Muhammad Yunus
#98. If we want to help poor people out, one way to do that is to help them explore and use their own capability. Human being is full of capacity full of capability, is a wonderful creation. But many people never get a chance to explore that, never, no that she nor he has that
Muhammad Yunus
#99. Soon we saw that money going to women brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men. So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a result, now 96% of our four million borrowers in Grameen Bank are women.
Muhammad Yunus
#100. 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.
Muhammad Yunus
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