Muhammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur, banker, economist, and civil society leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance.
Born: June 28, 1940 Chittagong, Bangladesh
Awards: Nobel Peace Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom
People should wake up in the morning and say ‘I am not a job seeker, I am a job-creator.
If you want to do something you have to imagine it. If you don’t imagine it, it will never happen.
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.
Today, the concept of business is to make money. Making money is the name of the business.
All people are entrepreneurs, but many don’t have the opportunity to find that out.
Business is a very beautiful mechanism to solve problems, but we never use it for that purpose. We only use it to make money. It satisfies our selfish interest but not our collective interest.
Making money is a happiness. And that’s a great incentive. Making other people happy is a super-happiness.
Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.
Human beings are much bigger than just making money.
People.. were poor not because they were stupid or lazy. They worked all day long, doing complex physical tasks. They were poor because the financial institution in the country did not help them widen their economic base.
Poverty does not belong in civilized human society. Its proper place is in a museum. That’s where it will be.
Poverty is unnecessary.
I began my career as an economics professor but became frustrated because the economic theories I taught in the classroom didn’t have any meaning in the lives of poor people I saw all around me. I decided to turn away from the textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person’s existence.
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.
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.
The oneness of human beings is the basic ethical thread that holds us together.
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.
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.
Nothing is quite as beautiful as farmers harvesting their rice.
we lent to poor women, the more I realized that credit given to a woman brings about change faster than when given to a man.
We have a lot of science fiction. We should write social fiction. Use our imaginations and make it happen.
If we are not achieving something it is because we have not put our minds to it. We create what we want.
