Muhammad Yunus - Banker to the Poor (1999)

19 Sourced Quotes

View all Muhammad Yunus Quotes
'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
Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor.

Muhammad Yunus
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
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.

Muhammad Yunus
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
UN studies conducted in more than forty developing countries show that the birth rate falls as women gain equality... I believe income-earning opportunities that empower poor women... will have more impact on curbing population growth that the current system of "encouraging" family planning practices through intimidation tactics.. Family planning should be left to the family.

Muhammad Yunus
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
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
If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty.

Muhammad Yunus
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.

Muhammad Yunus
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
Poverty does not belong in civilized human society. Its proper place is in a museum. That's where it will be.

Muhammad Yunus
I have come to believe, deeply and firmly, that we can create a poverty free world if we want to. I came to this conclusion not as a product of a pious dream, but as a concrete result of experience gained in the work of the Grameen Bank.

Muhammad Yunus
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
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
Things 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
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
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
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