Best 97 quotes of Jacqueline Novogratz on MyQuotes

1.5 billion people lack proper access to electricity. Many buy kerosene, which can cost 30 percent of their income. It sends millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. And often the lamp will fall over and catch the house on fire. So mothers hate it, but it's their only option.

Africans didn't want saving, thank you very much, least of all not by me.

After all this atrocity, this is how human beings really pray.

All people deserve access to health at prices they can afford.

As a young woman, I dreamed of changing the world. In my twenties, I went to Africa to try and save the continent, only to learn that Africans neither wanted nor needed saving. Indeed, when I was there, I saw some of the worst that good intentions, traditional charity, and aid can produce.

A sustainable world means working together to create prosperity for all.

Being poor doesn't mean being ordinary.

By going from the bottom-up again, we see where successes work, and you can also see where the status quo can be the biggest obstacle or roadblock to success. The kind of entrepreneurs in whom we need to invest are the kind who are willing to fight that status quo, bureaucracy, complacency, and corruption.

Dignity is more important than wealth.

Dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth.

Don't let people tell you to do it this way. You are on the verge of figuring out hybrid models -- with companies and nonprofits, markets, government, crowd-sourced philanthropy. The capitalist system as we know it is not working.

Each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And it's in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written.

Entrepreneurs are the seekers of solutions, and that they will go into these places where both market and traditional aid has failed or traditional charity has failed.

Every day we have a choice. We can take the easier road, the more cynical road, which is a road sometimes based on a dream of a past that never was, fear of each other, distancing and blame, or we can take the much more difficult path, the road of transformation, transcendence, compassion, and love, but also accountability and justice.

Failure can be an incredibly motivating force.

For too much of history, we've viewed the world's precious resources - both environmental and human - as things to extract, to make the most of in order to maximize their potential.

Four billion people on Earth make less than four dollars a day.

Freedom ultimately is dignity. And dignity, not income, is the opposite of poverty.

Girls and women are most victimised in societies where boys and men are disempowered.

Honour what is most beautiful about the past and build it into the promise of the future.

Human beings want to see each other. We want to be heard by each other.

I believe the government should ensure all children are provided with a good education.

I feel like I'm a relentless, pragmatic, determined optimist.

I finally understood: In order to contribute to Africa, I would have to know myself better and be clearer about my goals. I would have to be ready to take Africa on its own terms, not mine, and to learn my limits and present myself not as a do-gooder with a big heart, but as someone with something to give and gain by being there. Compassion wasn't enough

If indeed we can create systems that allow individuals to access goods and services like health and housing and energy and water, in a way that they can afford, they'll all have greater choice, greater opportunity, greater dignity.

If there's one value that is immutable, it's integrity or respect, for others and for yourself.

If you're looking at distributing alternative energy in Nigeria, for instance, what gets in your way is not people's ability to pay, not people's desire for a clean solar lamps or biomass opportunities. But there is a strong status quo that really depends on selling diesel.

I have also been touched by the dark side of power and leadership.

I have seen that traditional approaches to charity and aid don't solve problems of poverty. In fact, too often they create dependence.

I'm relentless in that I deeply believe in people.

I still feel that the kind of leader I want to be is one that spends time understanding our work in a way that allows me to translate it for policymakers and people who have real access to resources.

I think I still have a great sense of adventure and trust, and am surprisingly idealistic given all the horrible things I've seen since I was 25. I think how I have changed is that I have a much deeper understanding of the dark forces in the world, of power.

I think we so often equate leadership with being experts - the leader is supposed to come in and fix things. But in this interconnected world we live in now, it's almost impossible for just one person to do that.

It's about all of us, and the kind of world that we, together, want to live in and share.

I've heard it said that the most dangerous animal on the planet is the adolescent male.

I've learned that there is no currency like trust and no catalyst like hope. There is nothing worse for building relationships than pandering, on one hand, and preaching, on the other. And the most important quality we must all strengthen in ourselves is that of a deep human empathy, for that will provide the most hope of all and the foundation for our collective survival.

I was encouraged to break all the rules but to take the best of philanthropy, the best of investing, and the best of development finance, and experiment with new ways to create this venture capital model of using philanthropy to back patient capital investments, and then build solutions that were measured in terms of the kind of impact and change they were making on people's lives and in the world, not just on the financial return.

I was going to save the world, and I thought I would start with the African continent.

I wrote 'The Blue Sweater' to inspire more people to become engaged in working to solve the problems of global poverty.

Just start Don't wait for perfection. Just start and let the work teach you.

Listening is not only about waiting, but it's also learning how better to ask questions.

May each of you live lives of immersion. They won't necessarily be easy lives. But in the end, it is all that will sustain us.

Monsters will always exist. There's one inside each of us. But an angel lives there, too. There is no more important agenda than figuring out how to slay one and nurture the other.

My dream is to find individuals who take financial resources and convert them into changing the world in the most positive ways.

My whole life has been spent with people who have taken every knock in the world. No advantages. Yet they greet you with a big smile, they give you what they have, and they keep coming back. They are the fighters.

Nothing important happens in life without a cost.

One of the first things that surprised me in a positive, wonderfully positive way, is that this works - patient capital works.

On the one hand, I loved being a banker. I loved how numbers could tell a story and how you can invest in ideas and see them translate into products and services and create jobs. What I didn't like, particularly where I was working in Brazil during the debt crisis of the early '80s, was how the poor were excluded from the banking system. I made the decision to try and experiment with whether we could use the tools of banking to extend the benefits of the economy to the poor.

Our actions - and inaction - touch people every day, people we may never know and never meet.

People have to understand that unless social enterprise is experimental, it will not succeed in making a difference.