People Quotes by Muhammad Yunus

In the future the question will not be, "Are people credit-worthy", but rather, "Are banks people-worthy?"

— Muhammad Yunus

I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.

— Muhammad Yunus

Making money is a happiness. And that's a great incentive. Making other people happy is a super-happiness.

— Muhammad Yunus

People should wake up in the morning and say 'I am not a job seeker, I am a job-creator.

— Muhammad Yunus

Young people should think in a different way - they should be job givers not job seeker.

— Muhammad Yunus

What good does the theory [of economics] do if it is not working for people?

— Muhammad Yunus

...poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone.

— Muhammad Yunus

This is not charity. This is business: business with a social objective, which is to help people get out of poverty.

— Muhammad Yunus

I had no idea that I would ever get involved with something like lending money to poor people, given the circumstances in…

— Muhammad Yunus

I wanted to give money to people like this woman so that they would be free from the moneylenders to sell their…

— 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…

— Muhammad Yunus

People.. were poor not because they were stupid or lazy. They worked all day long, doing complex physical tasks. They were poor…

— Muhammad Yunus

Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world - out of six…

— Muhammad Yunus

Poor people always pay back their loans. [...] It is us, the designers of institutions and rules, who keep creating trouble for them.

— Muhammad Yunus

...culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street.…

— Muhammad Yunus

We developed microfinance to fight loan sharks - I was telling people don't go to loan sharks - not trying to take…

— Muhammad Yunus

I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and…

— Muhammad Yunus

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep…

— Muhammad Yunus

People need such a small amount of money to deal with their own daily life. Because wherever I went to school they…

— Muhammad Yunus

We can remove poverty from the surface of the earth only if we can redesign our institutions - like the banking institutions,…

— 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.…

— Muhammad Yunus

If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained…

— Muhammad Yunus

We create institutions and policies on the basis of the way we make assumptions about us and others. We accept the fact…

— Muhammad Yunus

I dismiss personal profit and focus exclusively on people and planet. That's what I call social business: a nondividend company dedicated to…

— Muhammad Yunus

Poverty is not created by poor people. It is produced by our failure to create institutions to support human capabilities.

— Muhammad Yunus

They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy.

— Muhammad Yunus

All people are entrepreneurs, but many don't have the opportunity to find that out.

— Muhammad Yunus

Some people think that poor people are lazy. Actually, it takes a lot of work to survive when you are dirt-poor.

— Muhammad Yunus

...a culture that holds people back should and can be changed...

— Muhammad Yunus

I’m encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is…

— Muhammad Yunus

Good economic theory must give the people the chance to use their talents to build their own lives. We must get away…

— Muhammad Yunus

Once poverty is gone, we'll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They'll wonder why poverty continued so…

— Muhammad Yunus

Microcredit has shown how you can reach out to people that conventional banking cannot. It has demonstrated that it's a doable proposition.

— Muhammad Yunus

I made a list of people who needed just a little bit of money. And when the list was complete, there were…

— Muhammad Yunus

Policies are also to blame: the only thing that the governments and people can come up with to give to the poor…

— Muhammad Yunus

We have a list of human rights - right to food, right to shelter, right to health, right to education, many such…

— Muhammad Yunus

I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger,…

— Muhammad Yunus

I did something that challenged the banking world. Conventional banks look for the rich; we look for the absolutely poor. All people…

— Muhammad Yunus

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way…

— Muhammad Yunus

I began my work in the '70s, teaching at a university in Bangladesh, and these economic theories that I had learned stopped…

— Muhammad Yunus