Muhammad Yunus Quotes

Corporations are not capable of doing things out of the goodness of their hearts. They don’t have hearts.

People are nicer than economists give us credit for. The economists cannot understand why people would work long and hard to clean up a community after a hurricane. … Most economists don’t have any interest in or understanding of psychology.

I believe in capitalism. I need to make a profit, but I would like to do it with ethics, dignity, morals. It's my dream.

We must take man as we find him, and if we expect him to serve the public we must interest his passions in doing so.

It's appropriate for people to pursue their profit motive in business. If you want to change that, you're going against human nature. But when it comes to setting the rules or creating the institutions, then you should have the general interest at heart.

It's essential that we understand things like the free-rider problem, but we also need to understand that, fortunately, humans are a little nicer than economists give them credit for. Some people actually leave money at roadside fruit stands; some people give money to NPR so we can listen to it.

Humankind would improve if we concentrated less on being human and more on being kind.

Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies.

I fundamentally believe that people have a genuine desire to be positively engaged in the world around them.

Corporations, consumers, and citizens must begin acting in concert to create a powerful third pillar of social transformation if we hope to meet the social challenges we currently face with equal force. This begins with corporations that choose to alter how they practice capitalism in two ways to serve the greater good.

If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?

It is the liberal philosophy, not the conservative one, that views humans as selfish automatons.

I guess because I'm a liberal I think it's not people's natural instinct to be completely self-interested.

I used to think that capitalism was human nature. Now I know that it is culture.

For conservation to be successful it is necessary to take into consideration that it is a characteristic of man that he can only be relied upon to do anything consistently which is in his own interest. He may have occasional fits of conscience and moral rectitude but otherwise his actions are governed by self-interest. It follows then that whatever the moral reasons for conservation it will only be achieved by the inducement of profit or pleasure.

Capitalism is not an orgy of human villainy: it is a Utopia that has dazzled and misled very amiable and public spirited men.

Until he has been part of a cause larger than himself, no man is truly whole.

It is absurd to suppose, if this is God’s world, that men must always be selfish barbarians.

We do not always act the way economists think we should, mainly because we're both less selfish and less rational than economists think we are. Economists are being indoctrinated into a cardboard version of human nature, which they hold true to such a degree that their own behavior has begun to resemble it.

In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience money.

The ages of greatest public spirit are not always eminent for private virtue.

Americans by nature are more philanthropic than most other people, but hopefully that will change.

My belief is that people are innately good and innately do want to help their fellow man.

Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.

Education and health were always matters of charity. You educated children and you helped the sick because they were good things to do, not because you were going to make money out of them. If you let the money-making principle, the profit-seeking motive, anywhere near education and health, things go bad.