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

Muhammad Yunus

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Muhammad Yunus
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: June 28
Banker
Economist
Entrepreneur
University Teacher
Chattagram
Social
Helping
Objective
People
Objectives
Charity
Poverty
Inspiration
Help
Business

More quotes by Muhammad Yunus

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If I could be useful to another human being, even for a day, that would be a great thing. It would be greater than all the big thoughts I could have at the university.
Muhammad Yunus
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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
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Like navigation markings in unknown waters, definitions of poverty need to be distinctive and unambiguous. A definition that is not precise is as bad as no definition at all.
Muhammad Yunus
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We believe that poverty does not belong in a civilized human society. It belongs in museums [...] A poverty-free world might not be perfect, but it would be the best approximation of the ideal.
Muhammad Yunus
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People can change their own lives, provided they have the right kind of institutional support. They're not asking for charity, charity is no solution to poverty. Poverty is the creation of opportunities like everybody else has, not the poor people, so bring them to the poor people, so that they can change their lives.
Muhammad Yunus
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I avoid grandiose plans. I start with a small piece that I can do. I go to the root of the problem and then work around it. It's building brick by brick.
Muhammad Yunus
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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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My vision for the future? Two things: to make credit a human right so that each individual human being will have the opportunity to take loans and implement his or her ideas so that self-exploration becomes possible. And second: that it will lead to a world where nobody has to suffer from poverty - a world completely free from poverty.
Muhammad Yunus
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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.
Muhammad Yunus
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Money commands everything because that's our interpretation of capitalism ... what kind of world is that? It's a very uncomfortable interpretation of a human being. We have been turned into robots.
Muhammad Yunus
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I was trained to become an economist and I finished my work and I was teaching and did my PhD so I thought I did that. I prepared myself for that kind of road. But then I realized that I had not learned enough to solve the problem of poverty. So I distanced myself from the things that I learned and tried to learn anew about people.
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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Making money is a happiness. And that's a great incentive. Making other people happy is a super-happiness.
Muhammad Yunus
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If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty.
Muhammad Yunus
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Soon we saw that money going to women brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men. So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a result, now 96% of our four million borrowers in Grameen Bank are women.
Muhammad Yunus
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The oneness of human beings is the basic ethical thread that holds us together.
Muhammad Yunus
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Human creativity is unlimited. It is the capacity of humans to make things happen which didn't happen before. Creativity provides the key to solving our social and economic problems.
Muhammad Yunus
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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
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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.
Muhammad Yunus
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The challenge I set before anyone who condemns private-sector business is this: If you are a socially conscious person, why don't you run your business in a way that will help achieve social objectives?
Muhammad Yunus