“We prepare our students for jobs and careers, but we don't teach them to think as individuals about what kind of world they would create.”

“The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world. All we have to do is to free them from the chains that we have put around them!”

“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 systems that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make up that system; the policies that we pursue.”

“When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.”

“I learned that things are never as complicated as we imagine them to be. It is only our arrogance which seeks to find complicated answers to simple problems.”

“We are faced with famine in 1974 and people are dying of hunger. When people are dying of hunger, and you are a young economic teacher, teaching an elegant economic theory in the class room, it doesn't make you feel good. Because all your brilliant theories don't seem to, come into use of the people who dying. And it 's death you cannot explain because it's not cause of disease. ..it's just of not having food to eat...So in the situation like that you have nothing but frustration and agony. So one way, I try to kind of enlightened my frustration and agony by coming to the conclusion that I may not be useful as an economist, but I'm still a basic human being. I can juts go out and stand next to human being. And see if there's anything I can do to another person. Even for a day if it is help, pay for more a day, I feel more a little bit better. So that's why I started going outside the campus..I thought if you can become an angel for 27 dollars, it would be fun to do more of it ”

“Even today we don't pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor worked harder, they wouldn't be poor.”