Matthew Lesko Quotes

Business is one of the most powerful institutions on Earth for creating wealth and opportunity and helping to lift people out of poverty. When you think about it that way, then business is not separate from development policy.

Let’s make the poor richer.

The developing world is full of entrepreneurs and visionaries, who with access to education, equity and credit would play a key role in developing the economic situations in their countries.

Nigeria has no business with poverty. With our human and material resources, we shall strive to eradicate poverty from our country.

The best way poor people can come out of their poverty is to get on the global highway, not on some dirt side road.

We must create economic opportunity, build a culture of entrepreneurship, get people to take responsibility for improving their lives, rather than putting them in a position where they sit back in their poverty and blame others for it.

We need to create jobs across Africa and provide its growing population with a route out of poverty where they are.

The way to turn our economy around is not by making rich people poorer, it's by making poor people richer.

When you create more small businesses, you create small entrepreneurship. Out of that comes self-determination and employment.

It's not government that creates jobs; it's small business. Our job is to make sure they have the access to capital, the access to contracting opportunities, and the help, advice and mentoring that they need to go out and be successful.

There are a lot of people who get support from a thriving business.

Lula da Silva was my hero when he was president. I Googled him so many times. The fact that he got 20 million people out of poverty... that happened by encouraging entrepreneurship, by supporting small business.

I founded Grameen Bank to provide loans to those considered traditionally unbankable. Grameen Bank works with the poorest and often illiterate, providing uncollateralized micro-loans for tiny business enterprises by which they can lift themselves and their families out of poverty.

Our goals for this nation must be nothing less than to double the size of our economy and bring prosperity and jobs, ownership and equality of opportunity to all Americans, especially those living in our nation's pockets of poverty.

I want to create economic opportunity at home and abroad. I don't want just one or the other. I want both.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion about the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.

I think the big thing is to talk about getting people working again and addressing the issues that are keeping small business from being able to grow.

If I care about poverty, I have to care a lot about investments in the private sector. The private sector creates the vast majority of jobs in the world, and social protection only goes so far.

Helping people boost themselves out of poverty is the best way to make a lasting positive difference in a person's life.

An important lever for sustained action in tackling poverty and reducing hunger is money.

Federal assistance helps millions of Americans escape poverty every year by providing the stability needed to take advantage of new opportunities. In fact, it is our safety net that allows full participation in the economy. More Americans purchasing goods means more Americans making them, which means more American jobs.

Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; and does away with it once and for all. Almsgiving leaves a man just where he was before. Aid restores him to society as an individual worthy of all respect and not as a man with a grievance. Almsgiving is the generosity of the rich; social aid levels up social inequalities.

Extreme poverty lowers the character of the democracy. Measures should be taken which will give them [the poor] lasting prosperity. And as this is equally the interest of all classes, the proceeds of the public revenues should be accumulated and distributed among its poor, if possible in such quantities as may enable them to purchase a little farm ... or make a beginning in trade or husbandry.

The poorhouse is vanishing from among us.... We ... today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.... We shall soon ... be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.

A generation of entrepreneurs will mop up poverty at a rate that no government ever could.