“Listening is understanding. The skill of empathy is a must to be able to listen…One can listen better if one sees the whole.”

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.

Good entrepreneurs can manage, but no one but an entrepreneur can entrepreneur, let alone help build and lead the world’s community of leading social entrepreneurs and their top business entrepreneur allies.

Every successful organization has to make the transition from a world defined primarily by repetition to one primarily defined by change. This is the biggest transformation in the structure of how humans work together since the Agricultural Revolution.

What is our job as entrepreneurs if not to change things that are crazy?

All of the top achievers I know are life-long learners. Looking for new skills, insights, and ideas. If they’re not learning, they’re not growing and not moving toward excellence.

If I had to sum up my practical skills, I would use one word: survival. And operating a hedge fund utilized my training in survival to the fullest.

The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.

The best computer is a man, and it’s the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

A lot of people didn’t get to see Butler’s skills throughout the course of the season.

She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl.