Muhammad Yunus
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.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Legal
Making money is a happiness. And that's a great incentive. Making other people happy is a super-happiness.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Education
I founded Grameen Bank to provide loans to those considered traditionally unbankable. Grameen Bank works with the poorest and often illiterate, providing uncollateralized micro-loans for tiny business enterprises by which they can lift themselves and their families out of poverty.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Chance
Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.Collection: Anger
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.Collection: Medical
Peace should be understood in a human way - in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights.Collection: Environmental
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.Collection: Finance
Poverty is unnecessary.Collection: Finance
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.Collection: Experience
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.Collection: Money
I dismiss personal profit and focus exclusively on people and planet. That's what I call social business: a nondividend company dedicated to solving human problems. You can go all the way, forgetting about personal profit, being single-minded about solving problems. The company makes profit, but profit stays with the company.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Environmental
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.Collection: Environmental
While technology is important, it's what we do with it that truly matters.Collection: Technology
Human beings are much bigger than just making money.Collection: Money
To overcome poverty and the flaws of the economic crisis in our society, we need to envision our social life. We have to free our mind, imagine what has never happened before and write social fiction. We need to imagine things to make them happen. If you don't imagine, it will never happen.Collection: Society
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today, the concept of business is to make money. Making money is the name of the business.
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.
Truly affordable but high-quality health care tools and services are the only means by which quality health care can be provided to all.
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.
Microcredit has shown how you can reach out to people that conventional banking cannot. It has demonstrated that it's a doable proposition.
Access to quality education has enabled me to reach far beyond the Bangladeshi village I grew up in.
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.
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.
Long live Grameen Bank. Let the power of poor women prevail.
Here we were talking about economic development, about investing billions of dollars in various programs, and I could see it wasn't billions of dollars people needed right away.
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.
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.
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.
The moment you say microfinance everybody wants to help you.
Human beings have enormous resilience.
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.
They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy.
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.
There is the expression of selfishness and there is the expression of selflessness - but economists or theoreticians never touched that part. They said: 'Go and become a philanthropist.' I said, 'No, I can do that in the business world, create a different kind of business - a business based on selflessness.'
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.
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.
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.
Business money is limitless.
I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.
I said peace is sometimes narrowly interpreted; it's the absence of conflict between nations or something. But peace is more inherent, more basic to human life, human beings, what we feel about each other, what we feel about life around us and what we see in our future.
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?
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.