Excertos do discurso de Muhammad Yunus aquando da recepção do Prémio Nobel da Paz, em Dezembro de 2006

Poverty is a threat to Peace

"(...) peace is inextricably linked to poverty (...)."

"Over one billion people live on less than a dollar a day. This is no formula for peace."

"(...) putting resources into improving the lives of the poor people is a better strategy than spending it on guns."

Poverty is a denial of all Human Rights

"(...) provide opportunities for people to live decent lives."

Grammen Bank

"I became involved in the poverty issue not as a policy maker or a researcher. I became involved because poverty is all around me, and I could not turn away from it."

"The bank said that the poor were not creditworthy. (...) I was stunned by the result. The poor paid back their loans on time, every time!"

We create what we want

"We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us, and that poverty is part of human destiny. This is precisely why we continue to have poor people around us. If we firmly believe that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have built appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world."

"We wanted to go to the moon, so we went there."

We can put poverty in the Museums

"I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social system that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make up that system; the policies that we pursue."

"Poverty is created because we built our theoretical framework on assumptions which under-estimates human capacity, by designing concepts, which are too narrow (...) or developing institutions, which remain half-done (...). Poverty is caused by the failure at the conceptual level, rather than any lack of capability on the part of people."

"(...) the only place you would be able to see poverty is in the poverty museums. When school children take a tour of the poverty museums, they would be horrified to see the misery and indignity that some human beings had to go through. They would blame their forefathers for tolerating this inhuman condition, which existed for so long, for so many people."

"A human being is born into this world fully equipped not only to take care of him or herself, but also to contribute to enlarging the well being of the world as a whole. Some get the chance to explore their potential to some degree, but many others never get any opportunity, during their lifetime, to unwrap the wonderful gift they were born with. They die unexplored and the world remains deprived of their creativity, and their contribution."

"(...) faith in the creativity of human beings,(...) [who] are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty."