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. – Muhammad Yunus
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. – Muhammad Yunus
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? – Muhammad Yunus
Truly affordable but high-quality health care tools and services are the only means by which quality health care can be provided to all. – Muhammad Yunus
Access to quality education has enabled me to reach far beyond the Bangladeshi village I grew up in. – Muhammad Yunus
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. – Muhammad Yunus
Nothing is more valuable to people than health care, and by paying, they feel less like beggars and more like ‘customers’ who can and should demand quality care. – Muhammad Yunus
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. – Muhammad Yunus
By simply capitalizing on core strengths and knowledge, companies and entrepreneurs can engage in an emerging business model that will enable them to create – and demonstrate – real, sustainable social impact in society. – Muhammad Yunus
Today, the concept of business is to make money. Making money is the name of the business. – Muhammad Yunus
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. – Muhammad Yunus
The new millennium began with a great global dream. World leaders gathered at the United Nations in 2000 and adopted, among others, a historic goal to reduce poverty by half by 2015. Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world in one voice, one that specified time and size. – Muhammad Yunus
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. – Muhammad Yunus
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. – Muhammad Yunus
Credit markets were originally created to serve human needs; to provide businesses and individuals with capital to start or expand businesses or fulfill other financial needs. – Muhammad Yunus
They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy. – Muhammad Yunus
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. – Muhammad Yunus
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. – Muhammad Yunus
I was born in 1940 in Hathazari, Chittagong, which is now part of Bangladesh. Education was always important to my parents, and with what little we had, they were able to provide an education for their children. – Muhammad Yunus
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. – Muhammad Yunus
Business is a very beautiful mechanism to solve problems, but we never use it for that purpose. We only use it to make money. It satisfies our selfish interest but not our collective interest. – Muhammad Yunus
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. – Muhammad Yunus
Making money is a happiness. And that’s a great incentive. Making other people happy is a super-happiness. – Muhammad Yunus
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. – Muhammad Yunus
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. – Muhammad Yunus
Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society. – Muhammad Yunus
Engaging in social business is beneficial to a company because it leverages on business competencies to address social issues, involves one-time investment with sustainable results, and produces other positive effects such as employee motivation and improved organizational culture. – 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. – Muhammad Yunus
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. – Muhammad Yunus