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

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.

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.

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.

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

Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer

The angels of the dark, restoring sight; We go — the pains of Day to soothe, console — Awake, arise! Behold thou art made whole.

Time by itself means nothing, no matter how fast it moves, unless we give it something to carry for us; something we value. Because it is such a precious vehicle, is time.

Talk to the guys that ain’t doing nothing, don’t talk to me. I just want eight guys out there with me who want to play.

I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.

Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.