Top 100 Kristof Quotes
#1. I know this might be breaking news to Nicholas Kristof, but guns being 'more lethal than anything else you have around' is sort of the whole point. The issue should not really be the lethality of the gun, but the but the psychology of the person holding it.
Glenn Beck
#2. The thing that I hate is that Nicholas Kristof style of writing where it's like, "I saw the poor, they made me so sad. What can I do about sadness? I am so brave." It's just like, shut up, man, shut up.
Molly Crabapple
#3. What the hell is that?"
I jumped and glanced over to see Kristof staring at Grady, who was waving his arms, rolling his eyes, shaking and moaning.
"I think he's possessed," I said.
"By what? Epilepsy?
Kelley Armstrong
#4. Most of the villagers were hiding in the bush, where they were dying from bad water, malaria and malnutrition.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#5. 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
#6. In the long struggle against sex trafficking, we finally have a breakthrough!
Nicholas D. Kristof
#7. You educate a boy, and he'll have fewer children, but it's a small effect. You educate a girl, and, on average, she will have a significantly smaller family.
Nicholas Kristof
#8. 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
#9. At some point, extra incomes don't go to sate desires but to attempt to buy status through 'positional goods' - like the hottest car on the block. The problem is that there can only be one hottest car on the block.
Nicholas Kristof
#10. I think we in journalism were really late to social networks. We had a built-in network already in terms of our readers, and we didn't capitalize on that.
Nicholas Kristof
#11. Utah may well be the most cosmopolitan state in America. Vast numbers of young Mormons - increasingly women as well as men - spend a couple of years abroad as missionaries and return jabbering in Thai or Portuguese and bearing a wealth of international experience.
Nicholas Kristof
#12. When we have a narrative in mind, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it.
Nicholas Kristof
#13. One of the things you learn as a journalist is that when there's no accountability, we humans are capable of tremendous avarice and venality. That's true of union bosses - and of corporate tycoons. Unions, even flawed ones, can provide checks and balances for flawed corporations.
Nicholas Kristof
#14. Humans pull together in an odd way when they're in the wilderness. It's astonishing how few people litter and how much they help one another. Indeed, the smartphone app to navigate the Pacific Crest Trail, Halfmile, is a labor of love by hikers who make it available as a free download.
Nicholas Kristof
#15. One death is a tragedy, and a million deaths are a statistic.
Nicholas Kristof
#16. 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
#17. The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.
Nicholas Kristof
#18. In effect, Saudi Arabia legitimizes fundamentalism, religious discrimination, intolerance and the oppression of women. Saudi women not only can't drive, but are also told by some clerics that they mustn't wear seatbelts for fear of showing the outlines of their bodies.
Nicholas Kristof
#19. 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
#20. Since the end of the 1970s, something has gone profoundly wrong in America. Inequality has soared. Educational progress slowed. Incarceration rates quintupled. Family breakdown accelerated. Median household income stagnated.
Nicholas Kristof
#21. Sexism and misogyny. How else to explain why so many more witches were burned than wizards?
Nicholas D. Kristof
#22. I had only one desire: to leave, to walk, to die, whatever. I wanted to get away, never come back, disappear, melt away into the forest, the clouds, no longer have memories, forget, forget.
Agota Kristof
#24. 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
#25. Too often, I believe, liberals deny that poverty is linked to bad choices.
Nicholas Kristof
#26. You will be judged in years to come by how you responded to genocide on your watch.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#27. Gays and lesbians began to gain civil rights when Americans realized that their brothers, cousins, daughters were gay.
Nicholas Kristof
#28. If I wanted a circus ringmaster, I'd hire Trump. If I wanted advice on brain surgery or hospital management, I'd turn to Carson. Fiorina would make an articulate television pundit. But for president?
Nicholas Kristof
#29. Sex and gender are such befuddling mysteries even for those of us who are in the mainstream that you'd think we'd be wary of being judgmental. Yet much of society clings to a view that gender is completely binary, when, in fact, there's overwhelming evidence of a continuum.
Nicholas Kristof
#31. I was the first blogger on the 'Times's website. That happened during the Iraq war, when I wanted an outlet for the things I was seeing every day that couldn't fit into just two columns a week. Then I became interested in using multimedia, specifically as a way to engage young people.
Nicholas Kristof
#32. The equivalent of five jumbo jets' worth of women die in labor each day, but the issue is almost never covered.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#33. [S]ex trafficking and mass rape should no more be seen as women's issues than slavery was a black issue or the Holocaust was a Jewish issue. These are all humanitarian concerns, transcending any one race, gender, or creed.
Nicholas D. Kristof And Sheryl WuDunn
#34. Even though we are peripheral to the slavery, our action is necessary to overcome a horrific evil.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#35. 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
#36. It really is quite remarkable that Darfur has become a household name. I am gratified that's the case.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#37. I'm sometimes embarrassed by how clinical I can become when I'm out reporting.
Nicholas Kristof
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Even when a social problem is so vast as to be insoluble in its entirety, it's still worth mitigating.
Nicholas Kristof
#41. 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
#42. The Golden Temple, Sikhism's holiest shrine, is in northwestern India near the Pakistani border, and it is a delightful place to contemplate the draw of faith.
Nicholas Kristof
#43. The conflict in Darfur could escalate to where we're seeing 100,000 victims per month.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#44. I suspect unconscious bias has been far more of a factor for President Obama than overt racism and will also be a challenge for Hillary Rodham Clinton if she runs for president again.
Nicholas Kristof
#45. 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
#46. 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
#48. During the Arab Spring, I learned all sorts of things from Twitter. I wouldn't necessarily trust that information, but it gave me ideas about questions to ask. You can really learn things from the wisdom of crowds.
Nicholas Kristof
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. The ice bucket challenge went viral in 2014, partly because it was so much fun to watch videos of celebrities or friends dumping ice water on their heads. Videos of people in the challenge have been watched more than 10 billion times on Facebook - more than once per person on the planet.
Nicholas Kristof
#52. On our way home we throw the apples, the biscuits, the chocolate and the coins in the tall grass by the roadside. It is impossible to throw away the stroking on our hair
Agota Kristof
#54. And death hasn't come. It never does come when you call it. It enjoys torturing us. I've been calling for it for years and it pays me no attention
Agota Kristof
#55. Our public figures are often narcissists, utterly self-absorbed in their quest for power.
Nicholas Kristof
#56. Remember that disadvantage is less about income than environment. The best metrics of child poverty aren't monetary, but rather how often a child is read to or hugged.
Nicholas Kristof
#57. The caricature of Islam as a violent and intolerant religion is horrendously incomplete. Remember that those standing up to Muslim fanatics are mostly Muslims.
Nicholas Kristof
#58. 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
#59. I think it's dangerous to be optimistic. Things could go terribly wrong virtually overnight.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#60. 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
#61. Every year 3.1 million Indian children die before the age of 5, mostly from diseases of poverty like diarrhea.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#62. Doesn't it seem odd that your cellphone can be set up to require a PIN or a fingerprint, but there's no such option for a gun?
Nicholas Kristof
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. lifetime risk of maternal death is one thousand times higher in a poor country than in the West. That should be an international scandal. The gap, moreover, is getting wider.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#66. Why are fanatics so terrified of girls' education? Because there's no force more powerful to transform a society. The greatest threat to extremism isn't drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.
Nicholas Kristof
#67. 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
#68. In America, we have subsidized private jets, big banks and hedge fund managers. Wouldn't it make more sense to subsidize kids?
Nicholas Kristof
#69. 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
#70. In 2013, 71 percent of black children in America were born to an unwed mother, as were 53 percent of Hispanic children and 36 percent of white children. Indeed, a single parent is the new norm.
Nicholas Kristof
#71. One of the aims of higher education is to broaden perspectives, and what better way than by a home stay in a really different country, like Bangladesh or Senegal? Time abroad also leaves one more aware of the complex prism of suspicion through which the United States is often viewed.
Nicholas Kristof
#72. One of the things that evangelicals do really, really well is to make giving a joyous, social enterprise. Too often, the world sees giving as a burden, a sacrifice, when in fact it's more like an opportunity to help others and oneself at the same time.
Nicholas Kristof
#73. It's maddening in my travels to watch children dying simply because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Nicholas Kristof
#74. Perhaps no country in Latin America is more picturesque than Bolivia, and the most memorable Bolivian city may be Potosi.
Nicholas Kristof
#75. Ben Affleck exec-produced a documentary for HBO called 'Reporter' about my 2007 win-a-trip journey. I take the trip each year partly to encourage young people to think about global humanitarian issues: I think blogs by a student may be more compelling for that audience than my own work.
Nicholas Kristof
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Young people often aren't in a position to write checks to charities. But there are two things they can do that are invaluable. One is volunteering, especially mentoring other young people with reading, math or help thinking about college. Through iMentor, one can even mentor people online.
Nicholas Kristof
#80. There's something to be said for CEOs' entering politics: In theory, they have management expertise and financial savvy. Then again, it didn't work so well with Dick Cheney.
Nicholas Kristof
#81. The U.N. Population Fund has a maternal health program in some Cameroon hospitals, but it doesn't operate in this region. It's difficult to expand, because President Bush has cut funding.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#83. I can't help thinking that if the American West were discovered today, the most glorious bits would be sold off to the highest bidder. Yosemite might be nothing but weekend homes for Internet tycoons.
Nicholas Kristof
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#88. One of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. Thus we managed to portray President Gerald Ford, a first-rate athlete, as a klutz.
Nicholas Kristof
#89. In much of the world, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is become pregnant.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#91. However imperfectly, subsidies for the poor do actually reduce hunger, ease suffering and create opportunity, while subsidies for the rich result in more private jets and yachts. Would we rather subsidize opportunity or yachts? Which kind of subsidies deserve more scrutiny?
Nicholas Kristof
#92. You don't want to fight the enemy anymore?"
"I don't want to fight anyone. I have no enemies. I want to go home.
Agota Kristof
#93. I've always been interested in public health approaches because it seems to me we have this yearning for silver bullets, and that is not in fact how change comes about. Change comes through silver buckshot - a lot of little things that achieve results. That's a classic public health approach.
Nicholas Kristof
#94. 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
#95. Too often, wealthy people born on third base blithely criticize the poor for failing to hit home runs. The advantaged sometimes perceive empathy as a sign of muddle-headed weakness rather than as a marker of civilization.
Nicholas Kristof
#96. America's education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.
Nicholas Kristof
#97. Beware of generalizations about any faith because they sometimes amount to the religious equivalent of racial profiling. Hinduism contained both Gandhi and the fanatic who assassinated him.
Nicholas Kristof
#98. Individual storytelling is incredibly powerful. We as journalists know intuitively what scientists of the brain are discovering through brain scans, which is that emotional stories tend to open the portals, and that once there's a connection made, people are more open to rational arguments.
Nicholas Kristof
#99. My walls no longer protect me. They never protected me. Their solidity is mere illusion, their whiteness is stained
Agota Kristof
#100. 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
