“Clearly, there’s some opportunity in the spectrum between those extremes. What’s missing is the for-profit finance industry coming in to that area.”

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?

Public service and respect for ideas is a recurrent theme in both the American and Australian sides of my family.

What is the most powerful lever you can imagine? A big idea, but only if it’s in the hands of a truly outstanding entrepreneur. It starts with the person and the idea, and then grows to the institution. All three are intertwined.

There is nothing more powerful than a new idea in the hands of a social entrepreneur

Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.

An entrepreneur is someone who brings a pattern change.

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

Sanity lies somewhere between the inhibitions of conventional morality and the looseness of extreme impulse, but the area in-between is very fuzzy.

Truly, with a sitcom and the rhythms of comedy… music is so helpful in that area of life.

The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light.

I’ve been successful in different areas, but nothing brings a smile to my face more than my oldest son, Zaire, and my second son, Zion, saying the kind word of ‘Dad.’

There’s always going to be pressure, and there’s always going to be an area where you disappoint. As a storyteller, you have to understand that.

Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.

Larry Bird is overrated in a lot of areas. … Why does he get so much publicity? Because he’s white. You never hear about a black player being the greatest.