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.

When you can hold the world in your palm and see it from a bird’s eye view, you tend to become arrogant – you do not realize that when looking from such a great distance, everything becomes blurred, and that you end up imagining rather than really seeing things.

The fact that the poor are alive is clear proof of their ability.

One day our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like.

There are many ways for people to die, but somehow dying of starvation is the most unacceptable of all. It happens in slow motion. Second by second, the distance between life and death becomes smaller and smaller, until the two are in such close proximity that one can hardly tell the difference.

NGOs are a force. We must realize the dreams of our youth.

Thus, the social business might be described as a “non-loss, non-dividend company,” dedicated entirely to achieving a social goal.

I believe that poor people are the world's greatest entrepreneurs. Everyday, they must innovate in order to survive.

I thought, if you can become an angel for 27 dollars. It would be fun to do more of it

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.

Always remember, job is a wrong idea. Don't ever look for a job, always tell yourself that I'm a job creator. I'm not a job seeker, I'm a job creator. So be a job creator.

Many people are dying of starvation, yet everyone is afraid to talk about it,

I learned that things are never as complicated as we imagine them to be. It is only our arrogance which seeks to find complicated answers to simple problems.

We prepare our students for jobs and careers, but we don't teach them to think as individuals about what kind of world they would create.

Most rich nations use their foreign aid budget mainly to employ their own people and to sell their own goods, with poverty reduction as an afterthought. The 25 percent that is spent in Bangladesh usually goes straight to a tiny elite of local suppliers, contractors, consultants, and experts. Much of this money is used by these elites to buy foreign-made consumer goods, which is of no help to our country’s economy or workforce.