“We need to teach empathy as we do literacy.”

The biggest problem is getting beyond the “you can’t” syndrome. The moment you figure that out, you’re on your way to flying.

There are millions of people who can get things done. There are very, very few people who will change the pattern in the whole field.

Everyone says youve got to do a foundation and legal structure to finance social change. What nonsense!

Organizations must shift away from repetitive-function hierarchies with rules and enforcement and walls.

The social entrepreneurs are governments’ best friends.

The most powerful force in the world is a big idea- if it is the hands of a great entrepreneur.

Instead, we must migrate rapidly to becoming a global ‘team of teams’ that comes together in whatever combination necessary to add the greatest value to the changes underway.

If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and can appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying into execution whatever can be effected by money?.

Social entrepreneurs are married to a vision of, for example, a better way of helping young people grow up or of delivering global healthcare. They simply will not stop because they cannot be happy until their vision becomes the new pattern.

To break the mental chains that make us small because everyone tells us we cannot.

What is the most powerful force in the world? And I think you would agree that is a big idea if it is in the hands of an entrepreneur who is actually going to make the idea not only happen, but spread all across society.

We started Ashoka here in India with a simple idea: that you needed social entrepreneurs to deal with problems that don’t fit the business paradigm.

If everyone is a changemaker, there’s no way a problem can outrun a solution

When you think for-profit and non-profit, you most often think of entities with either zero social return or zero return on capital and zero social return.

Imagine a world where everyone is really a change maker.

The new environment requires a shift in the organization of both institutions and societies, one of flexible teams of teams that come together around whatever change opportunities exist and then reform around the next.

What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that’s my function, but from time to time it’s possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.

Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in the moral and religious development of our people, that attention cannot be directed to him too often.

Anybody could say anything they want about me, and it literally never penetrates my skin.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it’s probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.

Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.

The number one problem in today’s generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.

Illiteracy does not impede the practice of democracy, as witnessed by the success of democracy in India despite the high illiteracy rate.