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

Muhammad Yunus

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Muhammad Yunus
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: June 28
Banker
Economist
Entrepreneur
University Teacher
Chattagram
Poverty
Create
Support
Capabilities
Poor
Capability
Human
Produced
Institutions
Humans
Created
People
Failure

More quotes by Muhammad Yunus

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What we need is to think strategically about development, analyzing a country's potential role in its region and the world in search of opportunities for growth. Platforms like the Global Social Business Summit can facilitate the process on bringing about change.
Muhammad Yunus
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Poverty is unnecessary.
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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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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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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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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The only place where poverty should be is in museums.
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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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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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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Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.
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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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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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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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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Credit is a human right that should be treated as a human right. If credit can be accepted as a human right, then all other human rights will be easier to establish.
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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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
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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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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