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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
Support
Capabilities
Poor
Capability
Human
Produced
Humans
Institutions
People
Created
Failure
Poverty
Create

More quotes by 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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I am proposing to create another kind of business, based on selflessness that is in all of us. I am calling it social business.
Muhammad Yunus
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Poverty is unnecessary.
Muhammad Yunus
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...poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone.
Muhammad Yunus
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I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.
Muhammad Yunus
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One day our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like.
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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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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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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Capitalism has been interpreted as an exclusively profit-centric human engagement. Some have been saying to bring people and planet into the picture. This can be a good change, but it is still not fully operationalized. Are you putting people, planet and profit at the same level?
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 we want to help poor people out, one way to do that is to help them explore and use their own capability. Human being is full of capacity, full of capability, it's a wonderful creation, but many people never get a chance to explore that, never know that she or he has that.
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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It's very difficult when you have learned something a certain way. Not only your mind absorbs it your eyes also are trained to see in a certain way because eyes are only as good as you've been trained to see.
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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...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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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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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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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