21 Inspiring Quotes for Social Entrepreneurs and Innovators

Being an entrepreneur can be lonely.  Being a social entrepreneur can be lonely and disheartening.  There are social entrepreneurs around the globe (see here, here, and here) who are striving to make the world a better place, but the community is highly fragmented.  This can equate to a very lonely path.

Please don’t give up.  Keep pursuing your mission- millions of people that you have never met depend on the work you’re doing right now. Whether it is 4:30am in the morning, or 11:00pm at night; keep moving forward.  To inspire you on your entrepreneurial journey, here are 21 quotes which I hope keeps the fire burning strong.

Social Entrepreneurship

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
-Winston Churchill

 

“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.”
-Bill Drayton (Ashoka Founder)

“Social entrepreneurs have existed throughout history. St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order, would qualify as a social entrepreneur — having built multiple organizations that advanced pattern changes in his “field.” Similarly, Florence Nightingale created the first professional school for nurses and established standards for hygiene and hospital care that have shaped norms worldwide. What is different today is that social entrepreneurship is developing into a mainstream vocation, not only in the United States, Canada, and Europe, but increasingly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In fact, the rise of social entrepreneurship represents the leading edge of a remarkable development that has occurred across the world over the past three decades: the emergence of millions of new citizen organizations.”
-David Bornstein (How to Change the World : Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas)

“We need to reverse three centuries of walling the for-profit and non-profit sectors off from one another. 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. 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. Look at the enormous diversity of the for-profit financial industry as opposed to monolithic nature of the non-profit world; it’s quite astonishing.”
-Bill Drayton (Ashoka Founder)

“I’m encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.”
-Muhammad Yunus

Inspiration

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
-Theodore Roosevelt

 

“Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future”
-Charles F. Kettering (American Engineer)

“Each time someone stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.”
-Robert F. Kennedy

“Founded on the principles of private initiative, entrepreneurship and self-employment, underpinned by the values of democracy, equality and solidarity, the co-operative movement can help pave the way to a more just and inclusive economic order”
-Kofi Annan

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.”
-Henry David Thoreau

Perseverance

“All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man adapts the world to himself. All progress depends upon the unreasonable man.”
-George Bernard Shaw

“Slaying the dragon of delay is no sport for the short-winded.”
-Sandra Day O’Connor

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
-Aristotle

Taking Action

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”
-Albert Einstein

Learn more about what you can do to help teach entrepreneurism personal leadership to inner cities.

“Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all — the apathy of human beings.”
-Helen Keller

“Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don’t recognize them.”
-Ann Landers

Challenges

“My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.”
-Muhammad Yunus

 

Poverty is unnecessary.
-Muhammad Yunus

“Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world – out of six billion people, more than three billion – do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame.”
-Muhammad Yunus

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
-Albert Einstein