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.

In other words, economic development should be judged and measured by the per capita real income of the bottom 50 per cent of the population.

If you are born into a poor family, if you are a woman you have seen the worst of poverty. In a cultural way in the families in Bangladesh it's the women who eats last. So if you have a scarcity in the family … she misses out so everything comes in the raw deal for her. So, given a chance she works very hard to make a change to improve her life. And by training she is the most efficient manager of scarce resources. Because with the little resource she has, she has to stretch it as much as she can to look after the children, look after the family and everything else..unlike men - men want to enjoy right away. Whatever he got, whatever tiny bit of thing he got he doesn't care for much what's coming up.

Approximately the size of Florida, Bangladesh has a population of about 120 million.

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

As a social business, Grameen Danone follows the basic principle that it must be self-sustaining, and the owners must remain committed to never take any dividend beyond the return of the original amount they invested.

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.

I believe that, ultimately, the only way to definitively eradicate the pandemic is to have a vaccine that can be administered to all inhabitants of the planet... The effectiveness of the upcoming vaccination campaign will depend on its universality. To ensure the availability of the vaccines to all people on the planet almost at the same time, it has to be free from ownership. To do so we intend to make a global pharmaceutical social business operational as soon as possible. I am looking for partners to help us achieve this goal... It has to be freed from commercial interest. The polio vaccine was declared as a common good, not owned by anybody. Why not (have) the corona vaccine follow the same path?

Analyses of the causes of poverty focus largely on why some countries are poor rather than on why certain segments of the population live below the poverty line.

Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society. For building stable peace we must find ways to provide opportunities for people to live decent lives.

We need to recognize the real human being and his or her multifaceted desires. In order to do that, we need a new type of business that pursues goals other than making personal profit — a business that is totally dedicated to solving social and environmental problems.

As a social business, Grameen Danone follows the basic principle that it must be self-sustaining, and the owners must remain committed to never take any dividend beyond the return of the original amount they invested. The company’s success is judged each year not by the amount of profit generated, but by the number of children who escape malnutrition in that particular year.

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. The next day she may not have the strength to continue living. I

GDP does not and cannot tell the whole story. Activities that do not require money changing hands are not counted as part of GDP — which means that, in effect, many of the things real human beings cherish most are treated as having no value. By contrast, money spent on weapons of

What happens to the rest of the world? It’s as if the rest of the world will be forgotten... This is a vaccine that is needed by 8 billion people. What happens to poor people? What happens to poor countries who cannot afford to pay the prices that they’ll be charging in the rich countries? With social business, shareholders don’t want to make any profit out of it so no dividend is taken from the company and we can reduce the cost and produce anywhere.