Muhammad Yunus

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.

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.

Truly affordable but high-quality health care tools and services are the only means by which quality health care can be provided to all.

Good economic theory must give the people the chance to use their talents to build their own lives. We must get away from the traditional route where the rich will do the business and the poor will depend on private or public charity.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I dismiss personal profit and focus exclusively on people and planet. That's what I call social business: a nondividend company dedicated to solving human problems. You can go all the way, forgetting about personal profit, being single-minded about solving problems. The company makes profit, but profit stays with the company.

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.

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.

Human beings have enormous resilience.

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

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.

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

The crisis is the price for the capitalist system

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.

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

Young people should think in a different way - they should be job givers not job seeker.

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