Daily Inspiration Quote by Muhammad Yunus

Yunus is talking like someone who learned the hard way that poverty isn’t just a shortage of cash; it’s a shortage of imaginable options. As an economist famous for popularizing microcredit, he’s not romanticizing “empowerment” so much as diagnosing the hidden infrastructure that keeps inequality stable: the stories societies tell about who deserves help, what counts as “bankable,” and which risks are considered normal for the rich but reckless for the poor.

The line about mindsets “instructing our eyes” does quiet violence to the usual technocratic fantasy that facts automatically persuade. Yunus is pointing to perception as policy: if lenders, bureaucrats, and even the poor themselves are trained to see certain people as unreliable, then every data point gets interpreted through that prejudice. Credit history becomes destiny. “Entrepreneurship” becomes a label reserved for those who already have collateral. The subtext is almost accusatory: the world isn’t failing because we lack solutions; it’s failing because we’ve naturalized a hierarchy of credibility.

Rhetorically, he makes mindset sound like a magician’s trick - “strange tricks” - which is a strategic move. It suggests bias isn’t always malicious; it’s automatic, habitual, socially inherited. That framing matters because it keeps the door open to change. Yunus’s real target is the paternalism baked into development economics: the assumption that poor people are problems to manage, not agents to finance. His challenge, then, is cultural: redesign institutions by first redesigning what we’re willing to see.