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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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Muhammad Yunus
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: June 28
Banker
Economist
Entrepreneur
University Teacher
Chattagram
Best
Belong
Might
Ideals
Human
Positive
Humans
Poverty
Approximation
Believe
Society
Museums
Would
Free
Belongs
World
Perfect
Civilized
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Ideal

More quotes by Muhammad Yunus

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They said, we have education, but what about jobs? So I started telling them, you should be taking a pledge, and the pledge should be: 'I'm not a job seeker I'm a job giver.' Prepare yourself to be a job giver.
Muhammad Yunus
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Some people think that poor people are lazy. Actually, it takes a lot of work to survive when you are dirt-poor.
Muhammad Yunus
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A culture that holds people back should and can be changed.
Muhammad Yunus
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Women have plans for themselves, for their children, about their home, the meals. They have a Vision. A man wants to enjoy himself.
Muhammad Yunus
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I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social systems that we have designed for ourselves the institutions and concepts that make up that system the policies that we pursue.
Muhammad Yunus
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If the basic structure of Grameen is changed, the worry is that the poor women who are the rightful owners of the bank will be disenfranchised.
Muhammad Yunus
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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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What I learned in school, what I learned in the educational part of my life. Trying to acquire a kind of a bird's eye view. You drive hard and see everything. And that's called education because now you can see everything.
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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We can remove poverty from the surface of the earth only if we can redesign our institutions - like the banking institutions, and other institutions if we redesign our policies, if we look back on our concepts, so that we have a different idea of poor people.
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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Policies are also to blame: the only thing that the governments and people can come up with to give to the poor people is charity. Poor people get hand outs from the state. But this is not a solution to 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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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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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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The developing world is full of entrepreneurs and visionaries, who with access to education, equity and credit would play a key role in developing the economic situations in their countries.
Muhammad Yunus
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...one cannot but wonder how an environment can make people despair and sit idle and then, by changing the conditions, one can transform the same people into matchless performers.
Muhammad Yunus
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..things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.
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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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