Muhammad Yunus Quotes

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.

Luxury may possibly contribute to give bread to the poor; but if there were no luxury, there would be no poor.

The more money you take away from families is the less power that family has. And that's a basic power.

The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, no worse, for a people than another.

What good is a high GDP if some, or even many, Americans are left behind?

I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.

If we are serious about breaking cycles of poverty, we have to change this (economy).

While economic development [in Egypt] made a few people rich, it left many more worse off. As people felt less and less free, they also felt less and less provided for.

There are millions more people living in poverty today than the day that Barack Obama with Hillary Clinton at his side, stepped into the oval office.

Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.

Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty.

People don't need to become more aware of poverty - they need to know how to end it.

We must have an economy that does not force the migrant worker's child to miss school in order to earn...just so the family can eat. That is the moral bankruptcy that trickle-down economics is all about.

There will be a debate on Firing Line between Buckley and Gore Vidal on the proposition: "This nation cannot survive as long as the income of 50 percent of the population is below the median." Mr. Vidal will take the affirmative.

The bottom quarter of the human population has only three-quarters of one percent of global household income, about one thirty-second of the average income in the world, whereas the people in the top five percent have nine times the average income. So the ratio between the averages in the top five percent and the bottom quarter is somewhere around 300 to one - a huge inequality that also gives you a sense of how easily poverty could be avoided.

The poor are great! The poor are wonderful! The poor are very generous! They give us much more than what we give them.

My people are poor and I am one of them.

we're focusing too much energy on the symptom rather than the disease: Our real enemy is poverty, not welfare.

Abraham Lincoln was on the side of the social scientists when he said, "God must have loved the people of lower and middle socioeconomic status, because he made such a multiplicity of them.

When people ask, "Why should the rich pay a larger percent of their income than middle-income people?" - my answer is not an answer most people get: It's because their power developed from laws that enriched them.

It's always the rich and there's plenty to waste, yet still China has a lot of people living in very spare, poor conditions.

In the operative opinion of the world, he who is already fully provided with what is necessary for him, that man shall have more;while he who is deplorably destitute of the same, he shall have taken away from him even that which he hath. Yet the world vows it is a very plain, downright matter-of-fact, plodding, humane sort of world.

Contrary to age-old prejudices, the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor, but helps to alleviate that poverty.

Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.