Political Quotes

“Madam President, it was over 20 years ago when I was a Member of the House of Representatives that one of my colleagues Mike Synar, then a Congressman from Oklahoma, asked me if I would like to join him on a trip. I said: Where do you want to go, Mike? I'm not all that popular back home in my district, so you better pick a place that we can explain. He said: I am going to take you to a place that no one will ever complain about. I would like you to go with me to Bangladesh. I said: Where is that? He said: I will show you. And off we went to Bangladesh halfway around the world. It was a great trip. It is a poor country that has been through a lot of political turmoil. It has had more than its share of natural disasters, and they are a remarkable people. During the course of that trip, I was introduced to an economics professor at the university. He was an interesting character. He would come up with a theory that he thought would help the poorest people on earth. It was known as microcredit, and he created something called the Grameen Bank, the people's bank. And, basically, what he set out to do was to prove that you could loan a small amount of money to the poorest people on earth and dramatically change their lives. They would pay it back, and they would start to be more constructive, more profitable in what they were doing. It was just a theory at the time, but he is starting to prove it.…”