Quotes from Bill Drayton

Entrepreneurs cannot be happy people until they have seen their visions become the new reality across all of society.

In 1962, when I was 19, I visited India. With introductions from people involved in the U.S. civil rights movement, I was able to visit with several of the leading Gandhians there. The hundred-to-one difference in average per capita income between America and India at the time was a stark reality for the people who became my friends there.

An entrepreneur is someone who brings a pattern change.

I was taught by my parents that people who are loud don't have anything to say. I've found if you're suggesting quite big changes, a quiet style may be reassuring.

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

The life purpose of the true social entrepreneur is to change the world.

Every child must master empathy-based ethics because the rules are changing; the less they apply the less learning them has positive impact

The social entrepreneurs are governments' best friends.

It's the combination: big idea with a good entrepreneur: there's nothing more powerful.

It's not to give people fish It's not to teach them how to fish It's to build a new and better fishing industry

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

We are all very deeply the children of our parents and their parents. Far more than we generally realize.

White House cultures inevitably reflect the president's character. Jimmy Carter is a thoroughly honest, good person. So was his White House.

The job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck & to provide new ways to get it unstuck.

The one single factor that determines society's success is the percentage of change-makers within it.

What does an entrepreneur do? The first thing is they've given themselves permission to see a problem. Most people don't want to see problems... Once you see a problem and you keep looking at it, you'll find an answer.

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.

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.

Change begets change as much as repetition reinforces repetition.

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.

What is your personal definition of "good"? A world in which everyone is universally empathetic and exercises love and respect with full change-making power.

We would like to have every middle and high school become a place where there will be lots of examples of youth competence and confidence.

Entrepreneurs almost always have to step out of existing institutions that embody old ways of doing things to build their vision.

We have to teach empathy as we do literacy.