Top 120 Muhammad Yunus Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A charity dollar has only one life; a Social Business dollar can be invested over and over again.”

— Muhammad Yunus

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

— Muhammad Yunus

3. “This is not charity. This is business: business with a social objective, which is to help people get out of poverty.”

— Muhammad Yunus

4. “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

5. “I’m encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.”

— Muhammad Yunus

6. “The oneness of human beings is the basic ethical thread that holds us together.”

— Muhammad Yunus

7. “Human beings are much bigger than just making money.”

— Muhammad Yunus

Featured in: Making Money Quotes, Humanism Quotes

8. “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

9. “Making money is a happiness. And that’s a great incentive. Making other people happy is a super-happiness.”

— Muhammad Yunus

10. “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!”

— Muhammad Yunus

11. “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.”

— Muhammad Yunus

12. “In my experience, poor people are the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. Every day, they must innovate in order to survive. They remain poor because they do not have the opportunities to turn their creativity into sustainable income.”

— Muhammad Yunus

13. “Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.”

— Muhammad Yunus

Featured in: Making Money Quotes

14. “The only place where poverty should be is in museums.”

— Muhammad Yunus

15. “Business money is limitless.”

— Muhammad Yunus

16. “If you think creating a world without any poverty is impossible, let’s do it. Because it is the right thing to do.”

— Muhammad Yunus

17. “Engaging in social business is beneficial to a company because it leverages on business competencies to address social issues, involves one-time investment with sustainable results, and produces other positive effects such as employee motivation and improved organizational culture.”

— Muhammad Yunus

18. “The moment you say microfinance everybody wants to help you.”

— Muhammad Yunus

19. “We have a list of human rights – right to food, right to shelter, right to health, right to education, many such items which are considered and accepted as bill of rights. These are to be insured to people. So all nations, all societies try to do that.”

— Muhammad Yunus

20. “Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor.”

— Muhammad Yunus

21. “I should never seek a job in my life, my mission in life is to create jobs. I am not a job seeker, I am a job giver.”

— Muhammad Yunus

22. “All people are entrepreneurs, but many don’t have the opportunity to find that out.”

— Muhammad Yunus

23. “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

24. “Each individual person is very important. Each person has tremendous potential. She or he alone can influence the lives of others within the communities, nations, within and beyond her or his own time.”

— Muhammad Yunus

25. “Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.”

— Muhammad Yunus

26. “I founded Grameen Bank to provide loans to those considered traditionally unbankable. Grameen Bank works with the poorest and often illiterate, providing uncollateralized micro-loans for tiny business enterprises by which they can lift themselves and their families out of poverty.”

— Muhammad Yunus

27. “Young people should think in a different way – they should be job givers not job seeker.”

— Muhammad Yunus

28. “Poverty does not belong in civilized human society. Its proper place is in a museum. That’s where it will be.”

— Muhammad Yunus

29. “Each of us has much more hidden inside us than we have had a chance to explore. Unless we create an environment that enables us to discover the limits of our potential, we will never know what we have inside of us.”

— Muhammad Yunus

30. “Today, the concept of business is to make money. Making money is the name of the business.”

— Muhammad Yunus

31. “Grameen Bank was formed as an institution owned by its borrower members, who are poor women. Through its unique decision-making process, Grameen Bank has given millions of women the means to emerge from the shadows in a male-dominated society and to make something of themselves.”

— Muhammad Yunus

32. “It’s very difficult to look at it in a kind of a free manner, what reality is. That was my first struggle, to see it as it is, rather than tainted by my own previous thoughts.”

— Muhammad Yunus

33. “An individual poor person is an isolated island by himself and herself. IT can end that isolation overnight.”

— Muhammad Yunus

34. “We have to get out of this mindset that the rich will do the business and the poor will have the charity.”

— Muhammad Yunus

35. “In a bird’s eye view you tend to survey everything and decide on a particular point, then you swoop down and pick it up. In a worms eye view you don’t have that advantage of looking at everything.”

— Muhammad Yunus

36. “In the future the question will not be, “Are people credit-worthy”, but rather, “Are banks people-worthy?””

— Muhammad Yunus

37. “Nothing is quite as beautiful as farmers harvesting their rice.”

— Muhammad Yunus

38. “Changes are products of intensive efforts.”

— Muhammad Yunus

39. “Once poverty is gone, we’ll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They’ll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society – how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair.”

— Muhammad Yunus

40. “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

41. “We got rid of colonialism, we got rid of slavery, and we got rid of apartheid everyone thought each one of them was impossible. Let’s take the next impossible, do it with joy and get it finished with and create a world free from poverty. Let us create the world of our choice.”

— Muhammad Yunus

42. “Money begets money. If you don’t have that, you wait around to be hired by somebody at the mercy of others. If you have that money in your hand, you desperately try to make the best use of it and move ahead. And that’s generating income for yourself.”

— Muhammad Yunus

43. “I have always said that human beings are multidimensional beings. Their happiness comes from many sources, not, as our current economic framework assumes, just from making money.”

— Muhammad Yunus

44. “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

45. “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

46. “A university should not be an island where academics attain higher and higher levels of knowledge without sharing any of this knowledge with its neighbours.”

— Muhammad Yunus

47. “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

48. “In Bangladesh, if a woman, even a rich woman, wants to borrow money from a bank, the manager will ask her, ‘Did you discuss this with your husband?’ And if she answers, ‘Yes,’ the manager will say, ‘Is he supportive of your proposal?’ If the answer is still, ‘Yes,’ he will say, ‘Would you please bring your husband along so that we can discuss it with him?’ But no manager would ever ask a prospective male borrower whether he has discussed the idea of a loan.”

— Muhammad Yunus

49. “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

50. “One day our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like.”

— Muhammad Yunus