"People should wake up in the morning and say 'I am not a job seeker, I am a job-creator."
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Quote collection
Muhammad Yunus quotes (page 1 of 8)
157 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"All people are entrepreneurs, but many don't have the opportunity to find that out."
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"One day our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like."
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"Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society."
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"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."
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"In the future the question will not be, "Are people credit-worthy", but rather, "Are banks people-worthy?""
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The oneness of human beings is the basic ethical thread that holds us together."
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"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."
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"A charity dollar has only one life; a Social Business dollar can be invested over and over again."
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"This is not charity. This is business: business with a social objective, which is to help people get out of poverty."
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"When a destitute mother starts earning an income, her dreams of success invariably center around her children. A woman's second priority is the household. She wants to buy utensils, build a stronger roof, or find a bed for herself and her family. A man has an entirely different set of priorities. When a destitute father earns extra income, he focuses more attention on himself. Thus money entering a household through a woman brings more benefits to the family as a whole."
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"Each of us has much more hidden inside us than we have had a chance to explore. Unless we create an environment that enables us to discover the limits of our potential, we will never know what we have inside of us."
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"Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor."
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"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."
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"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, it's a wonderful creation, but many people never get a chance to explore that, never know that she or he has that."
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"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."
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