Muhammad Yunus Quotes

A collection of quotes by Muhammad Yunus.

Muhammad Yunus is a renowned Bangladeshi economist and social entrepreneur. He was born on June 28, 1940, in Chittagong, a city in what was then British India. Yunus attended college at Dhaka University, obtaining his Bachelor's degree in economics in 1960. He later pursued a doctorate in economics from Vanderbilt University in the United States.

In 1976, Yunus founded Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, aiming to provide microcredit to poor individuals who lacked access to traditional banking services. The bank pioneered the concept of microfinance, granting small loans to impoverished entrepreneurs who used the funds to start or expand their own small-scale businesses. Yunus' innovative approach aimed to alleviate poverty by empowering the poor to become self-sufficient and improve their socio-economic conditions.

His work with Grameen Bank gained international recognition, earning him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Yunus became known as the "banker to the poor" for his dedication to eradicating poverty through microfinance. His efforts have inspired similar microcredit initiatives worldwide, providing opportunities for millions of individuals to escape poverty and improve their lives.

Beyond microfinance, Yunus has consistently championed social entrepreneurship, encouraging the creation of businesses that prioritize social and environmental objectives alongside financial gain. He has written several books, including "Banker to the Poor" and "A World of Three Zeros," spreading his vision for a more inclusive and sustainable economy.

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The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world. All we

The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world. All we have to do is to free them from the chains that we have put around them!

Truth Poverty Motivation Entrepeneurship

I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the

I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.

I had no idea that I would ever get involved with something

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.

Human beings are much bigger than just making money.

Human beings are much bigger than just making money.

Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, mo

Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world - out of six billion people, more than three billion - do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame.

Poverty is unnecessary.

Poverty is unnecessary.

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the m

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.

What we are trying to do is to create a social business in B

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.

Soon we saw that money going to women brought much more bene

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.

There is the expression of selfishness and there is the expr

There is the expression of selfishness and there is the expression of selflessness - but economists or theoreticians never touched that part. They said: 'Go and become a philanthropist.' I said, 'No, I can do that in the business world, create a different kind of business - a business based on selflessness.'

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of peop

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.

I said peace is sometimes narrowly interpreted it's the abse

I said peace is sometimes narrowly interpreted it's the absence of conflict between nations or something. But peace is more inherent, more basic to human life, human beings, what we feel about each other, what we feel about life around us and what we see in our future.

But we have created a society that does not allow opportunit

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.

I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My fami

I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family, there's lots of children, seven brothers, two sisters grew up together, fighting with each other, went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family.