Top 90 Jacqueline Novogratz Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Acumen Fund’s patient capital investment in Western Seed is intended to enhance the food security and economic independence of Kenya’s smallholder farmers.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

52. “Philanthropy is no longer about writing a check for $10,000 to the opera.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

53. “The poor also are willing to make, and do make, smart decisions, if you give them that opportunity.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

54. “Poverty is too complex to be answered with a one-size-fits-all approach, and if there is any place that illustrates that complexity, as well as a better way forward, it is Rwanda.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

55. “I believe the government should ensure all children are provided with a good education.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

56. “Don’t let people tell you to do it this way. You are on the verge of figuring out hybrid models – with companies and nonprofits, markets, government, crowd-sourced philanthropy. The capitalist system as we know it is not working.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

57. “There are cases where government-to-government aid actually has worked. Look at the eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio. But these are really top down solutions that require government-to-government support and aid.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

58. “Africans didn’t want saving, thank you very much, least of all not by me.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

59. “Human beings want to see each other. We want to be heard by each other.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

60. “When people gain income, they gain choice, and that is fundamental to dignity.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

61. “All people deserve access to health at prices they can afford.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

62. “People have to understand that unless social enterprise is experimental, it will not succeed in making a difference.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

63. “So many low income people have seen so many failed promises broken and seen so many quacks and sporadic medicines offered to them that building trust takes a lot of time, takes a lot of patience.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

64. “I have seen that traditional approaches to charity and aid don’t solve problems of poverty. In fact, too often they create dependence.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

65. “We have to remember that the girls and the women are most isolated and violated and victimized and made invisible in those very societies where our men and our boys feel disempowered, unable to provide.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

66. “Very small investments can release the infinite potential that lies in all of us.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

67. “What we call people so often distances us from them, and makes them little.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

68. “I was going to save the world, and I thought I would start with the African continent.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

69. “There are probably no more market-oriented individuals on the planet, than low income people.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

70. “Four billion people on Earth make less than four dollars a day.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

71. “Our actions, and inaction, touch people we may never know and never meet across the globe.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

72. “I’ve learned that there is no currency like trust and no catalyst like hope. There is nothing worse for building relationships than pandering, on one hand, and preaching, on the other. And the most important quality we must all strengthen in ourselves is that of a deep human empathy, for that will provide the most hope of all – and the foundation for our collective survival.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

73. “I think we so often equate leadership with being experts – the leader is supposed to come in and fix things. But in this interconnected world we live in now, it’s almost impossible for just one person to do that.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

74. “Though either choice was good, one was truer to myself... Ultimately, I reflected on Geothe’s invocation to ‘make a commitment and the forces of the universe will conspire to make it happen’ and chose the uncharted path.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

75. “There is power in creating a small model, and then you can create an alliance of other small models.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

76. “After all this atrocity, this is how human beings really pray.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

77. “This book assumes that you are interested in being part of world-changing human capital that will help solve problems big and small. Maybe you are a teacher or a communicator, an activist or a doctor, a lawyer or an investor, or some new force for positive change. I have seen people like you alter the lives of schoolchildren and street children, refugees, the formerly incarcerated; of people living in forgotten communities and in places ravaged by war, poverty, or toxic industries.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

78. “I’ve learned that generosity is far easier than justice and that, in the highly distorted markets of the poor, it is all too easy to veer only toward the charitable, to have low – or no – expectations for low-income people. This does nothing but reaffirm prejudices on all sides.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

79. “If you don’t like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.” – Marian Wright Edelman.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

80. “We are made from what came before. We make ourselves out of the promises that lie ahead. And we are always in the process of becoming.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

81. “We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.” – George Bernard Shaw.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

82. “Solving complex problems is rarely accomplished with a silver bullet or a single approach.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

83. “We can end poverty if we start by looking at all human beings as part of a single global community that recognizes that everyone deserves a chance to build a life worth living.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

84. “The point is this: We are the system. We decide how to define success, and we can reject purely individualistic terms.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

85. “With those you aim to serve or lead, your job is to be interested, to help make another person shine, not demonstrate how smart or good or capable you yourself are.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

86. “As Eleanor Roosevelt wrote long ago, the work of renewing a world based on extending dignity to every being on the planet begins in small places, close to home.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

87. “Language has very little to do with the words you say and everything with how you say them. Everyone understands what you are doing, even if the words sometimes don’t follow.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

88. “Rather than being rewarded for what we give, we’re too often affirmed by what we take.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

89. “When we dare to understand the other, we find the seeds of our best selves.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

90. “Moral leadership requires the judgment to make the right short-term compromises so as to realize the long-term change we seek.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz