Jacqueline Novogratz Quotes - Page 3

The poor also are willing to make, and do make, smart decisions, if you give them that opportunity.

Philanthropy is no longer about writing a check for $10,000 to the opera.

Freedom is what beauty feels like when it can most express itself.

Africa can stun you in an instant. It can throw floods and drought and disease at you, sometimes all at the same time. In the next moment, it will tease you with its magnificent beauty, so even if you don't forget, you can find a way to forgive. Ultimately, it keeps you coming back for more.

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

When people gain income, they gain choice, and that is fundamental to dignity.

What we call people so often distances us from them, and makes them little.

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

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

The time for us to begin innovating and looking for new solutions is now.

There are probably no more market-oriented individuals on the planet, than low income people.

When systems are broken, it's an opportunity for invention and innovation.

We need leaders, we ourselves need to lead from a place that has the audacity to believe that we ourselves can extend the fundamental assumption that all men are created equal to every, man woman and child on this planet. And we need the humility to recognize that we cannot do it alone.

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.

We don't see profit as a blind instrument.

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

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

Traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty.

We have to remember that the girls and the women are most isolated and violated and victimized and made invisible in those very societies where our men and our boys feel disempowered, unable to provide.

Poverty is too complex to be answered with a one-size-fits-all approach, and if there is any place that illustrates that complexity, as well as a better way forward, it is Rwanda.

So many low income people have seen so many failed promises broken and seen so many quacks and sporadic medicines offered to them that building trust takes a lot of time, takes a lot of patience.

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

When we were walking through the narrow alleys [of the Mathare Valley slums], it was literally impossible not to step in the raw sewage and the garbage alongside the little homes. But at the same time it was also impossible not to see the human vitality, the aspiration and the ambition of the people who live there.

We can send people to the Moon; we can see if there's life on Mars - why can't we get $5 [mosquito] nets to 500 million people?

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