Top 100 Nicholas D. Kristof Quotes
#1. Most of the villagers were hiding in the bush, where they were dying from bad water, malaria and malnutrition.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#2. Surveys suggest that about one third of all women worldwide face beatings in the home. Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#3. In the long struggle against sex trafficking, we finally have a breakthrough!
Nicholas D. Kristof
#4. In the wealthy countries of the West, discrimination is usually a matter of unequal pay or underfunded sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss. In contrast, in much of the world discrimination is lethal.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#5. If President Bush is serious about genocide, an immediate priority is to stop the cancer of Darfur from spreading further, which means working with France to shore up Chad and the Central African Republic.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#6. Look, we'll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#7. Sexism and misogyny. How else to explain why so many more witches were burned than wizards?
Nicholas D. Kristof
#9. Sandy was particularly destructive because it was prevented from moving back out to sea by a "blocking pattern" associated with the jet stream. There's debate about this, but one recent study suggested that melting sea ice in the Arctic may lead to such blocking.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#10. You will be judged in years to come by how you responded to genocide on your watch.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#12. The equivalent of five jumbo jets' worth of women die in labor each day, but the issue is almost never covered.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#13. Even though we are peripheral to the slavery, our action is necessary to overcome a horrific evil.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#14. You educate a boy, and you're educating an individual. You educate a girl, and you're educating a village.
-African Proverb
Nicholas D. Kristof
#15. It really is quite remarkable that Darfur has become a household name. I am gratified that's the case.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#16. As for wife beating, one survey found support for it from 62 percent of Indian village women themselves. And no group systematically abuses young women more cruelly than mothers-in-law, who serve as household matriarchs in much of the world and take charge of disciplining the younger women.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#17. The photos were taken by African Union soldiers. People in Congress saw them. I thought if people could see them, there would be public outcry. No one would be able to say, We just didn't know what was going on there.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#18. To be born poor in America today is to have a much smaller chance statistically of entering the middle class than was true a generation ago.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#19. The conflict in Darfur could escalate to where we're seeing 100,000 victims per month.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#20. 1266What matters to the children's well-being isn't so much the level of the family's wealth as whether it is controlled by the mother or the father.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#21. Was given as a first-world citizen, and I believe it is my responsibility to work so that these opportunities are available to all.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#22. Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did ... In contrast, legalizing and taxing marijuana would bring in substantial sums that could be used to pay for schools, libraries or early childhood education.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#23. The way you get leaders to care about issues of conscience is to apply political pressure. It's less a question of persuading leaders directly and more trying to build a social movement that holds their feet to the fire.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#24. More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#25. I think it's dangerous to be optimistic. Things could go terribly wrong virtually overnight.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#26. I try to be careful about wording. One of the things I've tried to combat in my blog is the notion that journalists are arrogant and unconcerned with the readership.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#27. Every year 3.1 million Indian children die before the age of 5, mostly from diseases of poverty like diarrhea.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#28. The north of the Central African Republic is now a war zone, with rival armed bands burning villages, kidnapping children, robbing travelers and killing people with impunity.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#29. Sometimes I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so that it might finally get the attention it needs. The barbaric civil war being waged here is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has claimed at least 30 times as many lives as the Haiti earthquake.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#30. Maternal health generally gets minimal attention because those who die or suffer injuries overwhelmingly start with three strikes against them: They are female, they are poor, and they are rural. Women are marginalized in the developing world, They are an expendable commodity.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#31. Photographs are still being taken but aren't being shown. There's one of a skeleton bound at the wrists with pants still around its ankles; if it was a woman, she was likely raped; if it was a man, he was possibly castrated.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#32. All of a sudden their husband's dead and maybe a child is dead and they have absolutely nothing - and they're heading through the desert at night.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#33. We tie ourselves in knots when we act as if democracy is good for the United States and Israel but not for the Arab world. For far too long, we've treated the Arab world as just an oil field.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#34. One of the great failings of the American education system (in our view) is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#36. Rising seas create a higher baseline for future storm surges. The New York City Panel on Climate Change has projected that coastal waters may rise by two feet by 2050 and four feet by the end of the century.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#37. There are 2-3 millions prostitutes in India, and although many of them now sell sex to some degree willingly, and are paid, a significant share of them entered the sex industry unwillingly.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#38. As soon as I was old enough to drive, I got a job at a local newspaper. There was someone who influenced me. He wrote a column for The Guardian from this tiny village in India.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#40. In much of the world, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is become pregnant.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#41. A Princeton University scholar, Susan Fiske, has used scans to show that the brains of high-achieving people see images of poor people and process them as if they were not humans but things.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#42. If the U.S. wants to help people in tsunami-hit countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia - not to mention other poor countries in Africa - there's one step that would cost us nothing and would save hundreds of thousands of lives. It would be to allow DDT in malaria-ravaged countries.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#43. In general, talking about human rights tends to be very persuasive for people who care about human rights.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#44. The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#45. We believe an international women's movement needs to focus less on holding conventions or lobbying for new laws, and more time in places like rural Zimbabwe, listening to communities and helping them get their girls into school.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#46. Environmental groups are too often alarmists. They have an awful track record, so they've lost credibility with the public.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#47. When women gain a voice in society, there's evidence of less violence.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#48. One of the things that really got to me was talking to parents who had been burned out of their villages, had family members killed, and then when men showed up at the wells to get water, they were shot.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#49. Leadership must come from the developing world itself, and that is beginning to happen. In India, Africa, and the Middle East, men and women alike are pushing for greater equality. These people need our support.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#51. Half a million women die each year around the world in pregnancy. It's not biology that kills them so much as neglect.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#52. The fact that people will pay you to talk to people and travel to interesting places and write about what intrigues you, I am just amazed by that.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#53. Women's empowerment helps raise economic productivity and reduce infant mortality. It contributes to improved health and nutrition. It increases the chances of education for the next generation.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#54. There are other issues I have felt more emotionally connected to, like China, where I lived and worked for some time. I was living there when Tiananmen Square erupted.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#55. Palestinian militancy has accomplished nothing but increasing the misery of the Palestinian people. If Palestinians instead turned more to huge Gandhi-style nonviolence resistance campaigns, the resulting videos would reverberate around the world and Palestine would achieve statehood and freedom.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#56. But they had learned an important lesson about how defeating poverty is more difficult than it seems at first.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#57. The bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#58. Let's recognize that success in life is a reflection not only of enterprise and willpower but also of chance and early upbringing, and that compassion isn't a sign of weakness but a mark of civilization.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#59. If only women are talking about women's rights, then the issue has failed from the start. If you think about the Holocaust, that wasn't just a Jewish issue. Civil rights weren't just a black issue.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#61. The child mortality revolution has used vaccines, treatments for diarrhea, micronutrients, and improved nutrition to reduce the number of child deaths worldwide each year from 20 million in 1960 to 6.6 million today - even as the number of children has risen.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#62. Give parents the tools to nurture their child in infancy and the result will be a more self-confident and resilient individual for decades to come. It's far less expensive to coach parents to support children than to maintain prisons years later.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#63. In India, a "bride burning"-- to punish a woman for inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry-- takes place approximately once every two hours, but rarely constitute news.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#64. While Americans have heard of Darfur and think we should be doing more there, they aren't actually angry at the president about inaction.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#65. Most of us employ the Internet not to seek the best information, but rather to select information that confirms our prejudices .
Nicholas D. Kristof
#66. Imagine the outcry if the Pakistani or Indian governments were burning women alive at those rates. Yet when the government is not directly involved people shrug.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#67. Here, in impoverished northern India state of Bihar, near the Nepalese border, there's not much else available commercially-- except sex.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#68. People get away with enslaving village girls for the same reason that people got away with enslaving blacks two hundred years ago: The victims are perceived as discounted humans.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#69. Americans of faith should try as hard to save the lives of African women as the lives of unborn fetuses.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#70. A few countries like Sri Lanka and Honduras have led the way in slashing maternal mortality.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#71. Often we blame a region's religion when the oppression instead may be rooted in its culture. Yet, that acknowledged, it's also true that ... it is often cited by the oppressors.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#72. Abortion politics have distracted all sides from what is really essential: a major aid campaign to improve midwifery, prenatal care and emergency obstetric services in poor countries.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#73. We, as Americans, have won the lottery of life and the distinction between us and people living in Kalighat is not that we are smarter, not that we're harder working, not that we're more virtuous - it's that we're luckier.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#74. Rescuing girls from brothels is the easy part, however. The challenge is keeping them from returning. The stigma that girls feel in their communities after being freed, coupled with drug dependencies or threats from pimps, often lead to return to the re-light district.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#75. The tide of history is turning women from beasts of burden and sexual playthings into full-fledged human beings.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#76. There are ten times as many sex slaves transported around the globe today as agrarian slaves were transported in the 1790s.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#77. Some degree of prostitution will probably always be with us, but we need not acquiesce to widespread sexual slavery.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#79. American feminism must become less parochial, so that it is every bit as concerned with sex slavery in Asia as with Title IX sports programs in Illinois.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#80. There seems to be this sense among even well-meaning Americans that Africa is this black hole of murder and mutilation that can never be fixed, no matter what aid is brought in.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#81. Just a little help, a small security force, a bit of food, can save lives.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#82. You don't need to invade a place or install a new government to help bring about a positive change.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#83. There could be a powerful international women's rights movement if only philanthropists would donate as much to real women as to paintings and sculptures of women.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#84. Solar power is one of the most hopeful technologies but still produces about 0.01 percent of U.S. electricity. The U.S. allocates just $159 million for solar research per year - about what we spend in Iraq every nine hours.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#85. Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#86. Why does the United States spend more than $20 billion a year on farm programs but less than $4 billion a year on education and early care for children in the critical first two years of life? Are corn and soybeans really a higher priority for America's future than our children?
Nicholas D. Kristof
#87. I went back to the women and said, 'Tell me exactly what you want us to do.' And they said, 'Don't do anything for us, do something
for our children'.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#88. It's time for a 21st-century abolitionist movement in the U.S and around the world.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#89. It is better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#90. In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#91. Capitalism, it turns out, can achieve what charity and good intentions sometimes cannot. Microfinance has done more to bolster the status of women, and to protect them from abuse, than any laws could accomplish.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#92. There isn't a political price to be paid yet for doing nothing. People need to get upset with President Bush. People need to get upset with their Congressmen.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#93. Teaching in a village school in Nepal was a freaking piece of cake compared to teaching in my native land.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#94. Women aren't the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#95. The United Nations has estimated that there are 5,000 honor killings a year, almost all in the Muslim world. But that estimate appears too low, because so many of the executions are disguised as accidents or suicides.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#96. Once you've created a connection of empathy, rational arguments can play a supportive role.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#97. Your book is full of piquant ideas on how sexual assault is practiced by many people but in African countries the issue is pressurized by females themselves as they tend to dress on night attires as a result males are piquant ed
to commit an offense
Nicholas D. Kristof
#98. We all might ask ourselves why we tune in to these more trivial matters and tune out when it comes to Darfur.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#99. The single most important way to encourage women and girls to stand up for their rights is education, and we can do far more to promote universal education in poor countries.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#100. In many poor countries, the problem is not so much individual thugs and rapists but an entire culture of sexual predation.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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