Due to an unavoidable scheduling requirement, there has been a change in the scheduled time for our Book Salon with Muhammad Yunus on Saturday, January 19th.  Mr. Yunus will be here at FDL to chat live with everyone regarding his new book, Creating a World Without Poverty, from 6 to 8 pm ET (3 to 5 pm PT).

Wanted to give everyone a heads up, so that you can note the change on your calendars.  Until Saturday’s chat, let me leave you with a thought from Mr. Yunus’ Nobel Prize speech from 2006:

Peace should be understood in a human way ? in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights.

Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society. For building stable peace we must find ways to provide opportunities for people to live decent lives….

We get what we want, or what we don’t refuse. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us, and that poverty is part of human destiny. This is precisely why we continue to have poor people around us. If we firmly believe that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have built appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world.

We wanted to go to the moon, so we went there. We achieve what we want to achieve. If we are not achieving something, it is because we have not put our minds to it. We create what we want.

What we want and how we get to it depends on our mindsets. It is extremely difficult to change mindsets once they are formed. We create the world in accordance with our mindset. We need to invent ways to change our perspective continually and reconfigure our mindset quickly as new knowledge emerges. We can reconfigure our world if we can reconfigure our mindset.

Please join us on Saturday from 6 to 8 pm ET (3 to 5 pm PT) for a discussion with Muhammad Yunus about Creating A World Without Poverty.