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

People should wake up in the morning and say 'I am not a job seeker, I am a job-creator.

Muhammad Yunus

work morning jobs

Making money is a happiness. And that's a great incentive. Making other people happy is a super-happiness.

Muhammad Yunus

incentives making-money people

All people are entrepreneurs, but many don't have the opportunity to find that out.

Muhammad Yunus

entrepreneur opportunity people

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

Muhammad Yunus

grandchildren optimistic museums

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

believe people world

In the future the question will not be, "Are people credit-worthy", but rather, "Are banks people-worthy?"

Muhammad Yunus

poverty credit people

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

poverty frustration rights

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

Muhammad Yunus

dollars charity social

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

entrepreneur fun people

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

careers jobs thinking

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.

Muhammad Yunus

stupid long country

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

Muhammad Yunus

oneness diversity brotherhood

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

Muhammad Yunus

rich poverty charity

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

optimistic giving-up encouragement

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

creativity keys problem

When a destitute mother starts earning an income, her dreams of success invariably center around her children. A woman's second priority is the household. She wants to buy utensils, build a stronger roof, or find a bed for herself and her family. A man has an entirely different set of priorities. When a destitute father earns extra income, he focuses more attention on himself. Thus money entering a household through a woman brings more benefits to the family as a whole.

Muhammad Yunus

mother dream children

My vision for the future? Two things: to make credit a human right so that each individual human being will have the opportunity to take loans and implement his or her ideas so that self-exploration becomes possible. And second: that it will lead to a world where nobody has to suffer from poverty - a world completely free from poverty.

Muhammad Yunus

self opportunity ideas

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

eye change faith

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

Muhammad Yunus

charity inspiration people

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

bricks roots inspirational