Top 100 Yunus Quotes
#1. The Book of Wisdom. Simab said: 'I shall sell the Book of Wisdom for a hundred gold pieces, and some people will say that it is cheap.' Yunus Marmar said to him: 'And I shall give away the key to understanding it, and almost none shall take it, even free of charge.
Idries Shah
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor.
Muhammad Yunus
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. All people are entrepreneurs, but many don't have the opportunity to find that out.
Muhammad Yunus
#8. 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
#9. A charity dollar has only one life; a Social Business dollar can be invested over and over again.
Muhammad Yunus
#10. The fact that the poor are alive is clear proof of their ability.
Muhammad Yunus
#11. 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
#12. Come let us be friends for once. Let us make life easy on us. Let us be loved ones and lovers. The earth shall be left to no one.
Yunus Emre
#13. My vision for the future? ... a world completely free from poverty.
Muhammad Yunus
#14. Human beings are much bigger than just making money.
Muhammad Yunus
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Too many words are lit for a beast of burden.
Yunus Emre
#20. 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.
Muhammad Yunus
#21. 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
#22. A heart makes a good home for the friend.
Yunus Emre
#23. 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.
Muhammad Yunus
#24. 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
#25. 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.
Muhammad Yunus
#27. Knowledge should mean a full grasp of knowledge:
Knowledge means to know yourself, heart and soul.
If you have failed to understand yourself,
Then all of your reading has missed its call.
Yunus Emre
#28. 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.
Muhammad Yunus
#29. 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
#30. We will make yogurt with all kinds of nutritious elements. We want to provide nutrition to the poor and children.
Muhammad Yunus
#31. Making money is a happiness. And that's a great incentive. Making other people happy is a super-happiness.
Muhammad Yunus
#32. How will history judge us? Will our tales be sources of inspiration, or wells of caution?
Yunus D. Saleh
#33. Engaging in social business is beneficial to a company because it leverages on business competencies to address social issues, involves one-time investment with sustainable results, and produces other positive effects such as employee motivation and improved organizational culture.
Muhammad Yunus
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Grameen Bank was formed as an institution owned by its borrower members, who are poor women. Through its unique decision-making process, Grameen Bank has given millions of women the means to emerge from the shadows in a male-dominated society and to make something of themselves.
Muhammad Yunus
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. In the future the question will not be, "Are people credit-worthy", but rather, "Are banks people-worthy?"
Muhammad Yunus
#40. To love the world is to be afflicted.
Yunus Emre
#41. 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
#42. Today, the concept of business is to make money. Making money is the name of the business.
Muhammad Yunus
#43. 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
#44. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.
Muhammad Yunus
#50. 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
#51. 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
#53. The only place where poverty should be is in museums.
Muhammad Yunus
#54. They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy.
Muhammad Yunus
#55. 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
#56. We got rid of colonialism, we got rid of slavery, and we got rid of apartheid everyone thought each one of them was impossible. Let's take the next impossible, do it with joy and get it finished with and create a world free from poverty. Let us create the world of our choice.
Muhammad Yunus
#57. Don't let me wander from Your love,
Don't let me leave Your door,
And if I lose myself,
Let me find myself with You.
Yunus Emre
#58. 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
#59. People should wake up in the morning and say 'I am not a job seeker, I am a job-creator.
Muhammad Yunus
#60. Some people think that poor people are lazy. Actually, it takes a lot of work to survive when you are dirt-poor.
Muhammad Yunus
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. If I told you about a land of love, friend, would you follow me and come?
Yunus Emre
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Truly affordable but high-quality health care tools and services are the only means by which quality health care can be provided to all.
Muhammad Yunus
#67. When you get a mobile phone it is almost like having a card to get you out of poverty in a couple of years.
Muhammad Yunus
#68. If I told you about a land of love ... would you swallow it as a remedy?
Yunus Emre
#69. Long live Grameen Bank. Let the power of poor women prevail.
Muhammad Yunus
#70. If you want to do something you have to imagine it. If you don't imagine it, it will never happen
Muhammad Yunus
#71. One day our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like.
Muhammad Yunus
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Young people should think in a different way - they should be job givers not job seeker.
Muhammad Yunus
#75. I was born in 1940 in Hathazari, Chittagong, which is now part of Bangladesh. Education was always important to my parents, and with what little we had, they were able to provide an education for their children.
Muhammad Yunus
#76. I believe terrorism cannot be won over by military action. Terrorism must be condemned in the strongest language. We must stand solidly against it, and find all the means to end it. We must address the root causes of terrorism to end it for all time to come.
Muhammad Yunus
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Access to quality education has enabled me to reach far beyond the Bangladeshi village I grew up in.
Muhammad Yunus
#80. 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.
Muhammad Yunus
#81. While technology is important, it's what we do with it that truly matters.
Muhammad Yunus
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world - out of six billion people, more than three billion - do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame.
Muhammad Yunus
#87. Good economic theory must give the people the chance to use their talents to build their own lives. We must get away from the traditional route where the rich will do the business and the poor will depend on private or public charity.
Muhammad Yunus
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. By simply capitalizing on core strengths and knowledge, companies and entrepreneurs can engage in an emerging business model that will enable them to create - and demonstrate - real, sustainable social impact in society.
Muhammad Yunus
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. We developed microfinance to fight loan sharks - I was telling people don't go to loan sharks - not trying to take advantage and make money for myself. I would be a junior loan shark if I did ... It is not a panacea.
Muhammad Yunus
#95. 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
#96. This is not charity. This is business: business with a social objective, which is to help people get out of poverty.
Muhammad Yunus
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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