Top 120 Muhammad Yunus Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Some people think that poor people are lazy. Actually, it takes a lot of work to survive when you are dirt-poor.”

— Muhammad Yunus

53. “Nothing is more valuable to people than health care, and by paying, they feel less like beggars and more like customers who can and should demand quality care.”

— Muhammad Yunus

54. “The fact that the poor are alive is clear proof of their ability.”

— Muhammad Yunus

55. “There are cultural issues everywhere – in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences.”

— Muhammad Yunus

56. “By simply capitalizing on core strengths and knowledge, companies and entrepreneurs can engage in an emerging business model that will enable them to create – and demonstrate – real, sustainable social impact in society.”

— Muhammad Yunus

57. “Long live Grameen Bank. Let the power of poor women prevail.”

— Muhammad Yunus

58. “Microcredit has shown how you can reach out to people that conventional banking cannot. It has demonstrated that it’s a doable proposition.”

— Muhammad Yunus

59. “I made a list of people who needed just a little bit of money. And when the list was complete, there were 42 names. The total amount of money they needed was $27. I was shocked.”

— Muhammad Yunus

60. “I have come to believe, deeply and firmly, that we can create a poverty free world if we want to. I came to this conclusion not as a product of a pious dream, but as a concrete result of experience gained in the work of the Grameen Bank.”

— Muhammad Yunus

61. “We prepare our students for jobs and careers, but we don’t teach them to think as individuals about what kind of world they would create.”

— Muhammad Yunus

62. “Human beings have enormous resilience.”

— Muhammad Yunus

63. “Access to quality education has enabled me to reach far beyond the Bangladeshi village I grew up in.”

— Muhammad Yunus

64. “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

65. “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.”

— Muhammad Yunus

66. “When a crisis is at its deepest, it can offer a huge opportunity. When things fall apart, we can redesign, recast, and rebuild.”

— Muhammad Yunus

67. “Human beings are much more complex than just being instruments for making money.”

— Muhammad Yunus

68. “They said, we have education, but what about jobs? So I started telling them, you should be taking a pledge, and the pledge should be: ‘I’m not a job seeker; I’m a job giver.’ Prepare yourself to be a job giver.”

— Muhammad Yunus

69. “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

70. “We have done some of these in Bangladesh. Whenever I see a problem, I immediately go and create a company. That’s what I did all my life.”

— Muhammad Yunus

71. “So i say, change the base! If you change the base, anybody will be as tall as anybody else! My belief is poverty is not caused by poor ppl. Poverty is caused by the system. Poverty is caused by the policies that we pursue.”

— Muhammad Yunus

72. “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.”

— Muhammad Yunus

73. “They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy.”

— Muhammad Yunus

74. “Human beings are not just workers, consumers, or even entrepreneurs. They are also parents, children, friends, neighbors, and citizens. They worry about their families, care about the communities where they live, and think a lot about their reputations and their relationships with others. For.”

— Muhammad Yunus

75. “All they need is opportunity.”

— Muhammad Yunus

76. “Even today we don’t pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor worked harder, they wouldn’t be poor.”

— Muhammad Yunus

77. “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

78. “When you can hold the world in your palm and see it from a bird’s eye view, you tend to become arrogant – you do not realize that when looking from such a great distance, everything becomes blurred, and that you end up imagining rather than really seeing things.”

— Muhammad Yunus

79. “If we are looking for one single action which will enable the poor to overcome their poverty, I would focus on credit.”

— Muhammad Yunus

80. “My experience working in the Grameen Bank has given me faith; an unshakable faith in the creativity of human beings. It leads me to believe that humans are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty. They suffer now as they did in the past because we turn our heads away from this issue.”

— Muhammad Yunus

81. “Health care can be made more affordable for the poor without requiring major new scientific developments, just the smart application of current technologies. We have seen a $25 incubator and diagnostic instruments that are built tough, cheap, and reusable for the developing world.”

— Muhammad Yunus

82. “The profit orientation is only one orientation of a person. The same people who are interested in profit-making are also selfless. I am not saying that capitalist theory is wrong. I am saying that it has not been interpreted and practiced fully.”

— Muhammad Yunus

83. “When you get a mobile phone it is almost like having a card to get you out of poverty in a couple of years.”

— Muhammad Yunus

84. “Poor people always pay back their loans. It’s us, the creators of institutions and rules, who keep creating trouble for them.”

— Muhammad Yunus

85. “I will not spend the money for myself. I will rather spend it in special business on a no-profit-no-loss policy. We will also establish an eye hospital where even beggars will be given treatment at the cost of Taka 10-20.”

— Muhammad Yunus

86. “The process of breaking down fear was always my greatest challenge and it was made easier by the careful work and gentle voices of my female workers.”

— Muhammad Yunus

87. “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.”

— Muhammad Yunus

88. “We need to recognize the real human being and his or her multifaceted desires. In order to do that, we need a new type of business that pursues goals other than making personal profit – a business that is totally dedicated to solving social and environmental problems. In.”

— Muhammad Yunus

89. “If I could be useful to another human being, even for a day, that would be a great thing. It would be greater than all the big thoughts I could have at the university.”

— Muhammad Yunus

90. “I’m on the faculty. I teach. And it’s not easy for a poor person to enter the campus to track down the professor in the campus in a Bangladesh situation. They all will be stopped at the gate. You have no business in the university!”

— Muhammad Yunus

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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, is a wonderful creation. But many people never get a chance to explore that, never, no that she nor he has that.”

— Muhammad Yunus

94. “The current financial crisis makes it very clears that the system that we have isn’t really working, and this is the right time for us to undo things and build them in a new way.”

— Muhammad Yunus

95. “Peace should be understood in a human way – in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights.”

— Muhammad Yunus

96. “In this world of plenty, a tiny baby, who does not yet understand the mystery of the world, is allowed to cry and cry and finally fall asleep without the milk she needs to survive.”

— Muhammad Yunus

97. “The poor,” I said, “are very creative. They know how to earn a living and how to change their lives.”

— Muhammad Yunus

98. “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

99. “The challenge I set before anyone who condemns private-sector business is this: If you are a socially conscious person, why don’t you run your business in a way that will help achieve social objectives?”

— Muhammad Yunus

100. “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