Muhammad Yunus Quotes

The poor are little folks living on little lands who want what we already have.

Poverty is not a trait of character. It is created anew in each generation but not by heredity, by circumstances.

The biggest problem is that the rich people paying the bills do not share the same goals as the poor people they are trying to help. The wealthy have weak incentives to get the right amount of the right thing to those who need it; the poor are in no position to complain if they don’t.

A rising tide lifts all boats but if you can’t afford a boat, the tide goes up your nose.

The great mass of the poor in countries are become an hereditary race, and it is next to impossible them to get out of that state of themselves

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

The rich, by unfair combinations, contribute frequently to prolong a season of distress among the poor.

In a sane, civil, intelligent and moral society, you don't blame poor people for being poor.

I've always stood on one fact - that all over the world, there are only two things, the Establishment and the poor people. The poor people are a massive majority and across the world they are exploited in different kinds of ways. The Establishment depends on exploiting raw materials and the poor.

There are two Americas - separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed.

There is another world out there, the existence of which the Court, I suspect, either chooses to ignore or fears to recognize. And so the cancer of poverty will continue to grow.

One must denounce the economic, financial, and social mechanisms and structures that are manipulated by the rich and powerful for their own benefit at the expense of the poor

Poverty is an artificial imposition on a human being.

Poor people don’t make campaign contributions.

… the struggling masses

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

Poverty is a result of lack of opportunity. Lack of opportunity is about being without power, without being in a position to make choices.

I think that capitalism in general is responsible, not for the worldwide recession, but for a lot of suffering, both in the United States and around the world.

The rich stick together; the poor and the marginalised are thrown together.

Who is affected more when it's cold? Poor people. Who is affected more when it's hot? Poor people. Who is affected more when it's wet? Poor people. Who is most affected when the economy is bad? Poor people. Poor people are the most fragile.

The second truism that we must understand is that poverty does not create our social problems, our social problems create our poverty.

Speaking as a black person, welfare is the worst thing that's ever happened to us.