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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

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Muhammad Yunus
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: June 28
Banker
Economist
Entrepreneur
University Teacher
Chattagram
Something
Involved
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Working
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Poor
People
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Bangladesh
Ideas
Lending
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More quotes by Muhammad Yunus

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I was an economist now turning into a human being - as if these are two different things. I don't know but I did that and then I had no vision.
Muhammad Yunus
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I had only immediate things today, only today, not tomorrow. I don't know what will happen tomorrow. Today I can see myself like crystal.
Muhammad Yunus
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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.
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People need such a small amount of money to deal with their own daily life. Because wherever I went to school they taught me about millions of dollars. I dealt with billions of dollars in national plans and investment plans and so on. Not this tiny money, $27 for 42 people.
Muhammad Yunus
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Poverty is not created by poor people. It is produced by our failure to create institutions to support human capabilities.
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What is entrepreneurship, after all? Bigness is not the issue. Poor people are the ones who take challenges every day. The guy who sells a hot dog on the street is as much an entrepreneur as anyone else. Getting his $50 loan to start could be as difficult as finding $50 million for someone else. All people are entrepreneurs.
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The moment you say microfinance everybody wants to help you.
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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.
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If the helplessness and isolation of labour, who have nothing to sell but their labour, can be totally removed by connecting labour with capital through a universal credit system, we'll then have other kinds of actors on the economic scene different from what the existing capitalist world would allow us to bring out.
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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
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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
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Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.
Muhammad Yunus
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I made a list of people who needed just a little bit of money. And when the list was complete, there were 42 names. The total amount of money they needed was $27. I was shocked.
Muhammad Yunus
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Health care can be made more affordable for the poor without requiring major new scientific developments, just the smart application of current technologies. We have seen a $25 incubator and diagnostic instruments that are built tough, cheap, and reusable for the developing world.
Muhammad Yunus
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If you want to do something you have to imagine it. If you don’t imagine it, it will never happen
Muhammad Yunus
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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
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I'm finding that knocking at their mindsets is hard work. A simple knock will not make it crawl. I was trying to push it. I was trying to find a bird's eye view where I could find a big solution. So this is what I was trying.
Muhammad Yunus
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We have done some of these in Bangladesh. Whenever I see a problem, I immediately go and create a company. That's what I did all my life.
Muhammad Yunus
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But we have created a society that does not allow opportunities for those people to take care of themselves because we have denied them those opportunities.
Muhammad Yunus
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Making money is a happiness. And that's a great incentive. Making other people happy is a super-happiness.
Muhammad Yunus