Top 120 Muhammad Yunus Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 3

101. “I was an economist now turning into a human being – as if these are two different things. I don’t know but I did that and then I had no vision.”

— Muhammad Yunus

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

— Muhammad Yunus

103. “Policies are also to blame: the only thing that the governments and people can come up with to give to the poor people is charity. Poor people get hand outs from the state. But this is not a solution to poverty.”

— Muhammad Yunus

104. “We will make yogurt with all kinds of nutritious elements. We want to provide nutrition to the poor and children.”

— Muhammad Yunus

105. “Human beings are extremely creative and resilient, especially when they are operating within an institutional framework that encourages and supports their actions.”

— Muhammad Yunus

106. “Poverty is unnecessary.”

— Muhammad Yunus

107. “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

108. “Here we were talking about economic development, about investing billions of dollars in various programs, and I could see it wasn’t billions of dollars people needed right away.”

— Muhammad Yunus

109. “The crisis is the price for the capitalist system.”

— Muhammad Yunus

110. “Mother always put money away for any poor relatives who visited us from distant villages. It was she, by her concern for the poor and the disadvantaged, who helped me discover my interest in economics and social reform. Mother.”

— Muhammad Yunus

111. “There are many ways for people to die, but somehow dying of starvation is the most unacceptable of all. It happens in slow motion. Second by second, the distance between life and death becomes smaller and smaller, until the two are in such close proximity that one can hardly tell the difference.”

— Muhammad Yunus

112. “I’m finding that knocking at their mindsets is hard work. A simple knock will not make it crawl. I was trying to push it. I was trying to find a bird’s eye view where I could find a big solution. So this is what I was trying.”

— Muhammad Yunus

113. “I wanted to give money to people like this woman so that they would be free from the moneylenders to sell their product at the price which the markets gave them – which was much higher than what the trader was giving them.”

— Muhammad Yunus

114. “I believe that “government”, as we know it today, should pull out of most things except for law enforcement and justice, national defense and foreign policy, and let the private sector, a “Grameenized private sector”, a social-consciousness-driven private sector, take over their other functions.”

— Muhammad Yunus

115. “I had only immediate things today, only today, not tomorrow. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Today I can see myself like crystal.”

— Muhammad Yunus

116. “I think, social business is the most logical thing to do. If we had done that, we could reduce all the problems we have.”

— Muhammad Yunus

117. “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.”

— Muhammad Yunus

118. “We can remove poverty from the surface of the earth only if we can redesign our institutions – like the banking institutions, and other institutions; if we redesign our policies, if we look back on our concepts, so that we have a different idea of poor people.”

— Muhammad Yunus

119. “The Grameen Bank Ordinance with amendments up to 2008 is a beautiful legal structure for the fulfillment of the ideals and objectives of the bank. Any change in this structure will be devastating for the bank.”

— Muhammad Yunus

120. “When you say vision you have a track that this is what I would like to say.”

— Muhammad Yunus

121. “If the basic structure of Grameen is changed, the worry is that the poor women who are the rightful owners of the bank will be disenfranchised.”

— Muhammad Yunus

122. “I avoid grandiose plans. I start with a small piece that I can do. I go to the root of the problem and then work around it. It’s building brick by brick.”

— Muhammad Yunus

123. “Yes, they will. They do. Unlike the rich, the poor can’t risk not repaying. This is the only chance they have.” The.”

— Muhammad Yunus

124. “I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation.”

— Muhammad Yunus

125. “I would define development by focusing on the quality of life of the lower 25 percent of the population. This.”

— Muhammad Yunus

126. “By the time the war was over, Bangladesh was a devastated country. The economy was shattered. Millions of people needed to be rehabilitated. I knew that I had to return home and participate in the work of nation building. I thought I owed it to myself.”

— Muhammad Yunus

127. “The able-bodied poor don’t want or need charity. The dole only increases their misery, robs them of incentive and, more important, of self-respect.”

— Muhammad Yunus

128. “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.”

— Muhammad Yunus

129. “There is no room in the economic literature for people making a living through self-employment, finding way to develop goods or services that they sell directly to those who need them. But in the real world, that’s what you see the poor doing everywhere.”

— Muhammad Yunus

130. “I try to kind of enlightened my frustration and agony by coming to the conclusion that I may not be useful as an economist but I m still a basic human being. I can juts go out and stand next to human being. And see if there s anything I can do to another person. Even for a day if it is help pay for more a day I feel more a little bit better.”

— Muhammad Yunus

131. “Analyses of the causes of poverty focus largely on why some countries are poor rather than on why certain segments of the population live below the poverty line.”

— Muhammad Yunus

132. “I profoundly believer, as Grammen’s experience over twenty years has shown, that personal gains is not the only possible fuel for free enterprise. Social goals can replace greed as a powerful motivational force. Social-consciousness-driven enterprises can be formidable competitors for the greed-based enterprises. I believe that if we play our cards right, social-consciousness-driven enterprises can do very well in the marketplace.”

— Muhammad Yunus

133. “To me, it doesn’t make sense. The poorest of the poor work twelve hours a day. They need to sell and earn income to eat. They have every reason to pay you back, just to take another loan and live another day! That is the best security you can have – their life.” The manager shook his head. “You are an idealist, Professor. You live with books and theories.” “But.”

— Muhammad Yunus

134. “I thought, if you can become an angel for 27 dollars. It would be fun to do more of it.”

— Muhammad Yunus

135. “In the United States I saw how the market liberates the individual and allows people to be free to make personal choices.”

— Muhammad Yunus