Nicholas D. Kristof Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

Teaching in a village school in Nepal was a freaking piece of cake compared to teaching in my native land. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

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

The conflict in Darfur could escalate to where we're seeing 100,000 victims per month. — Nicholas D. Kristof

A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back into the water. "What are you doing, son?" the man asks. "You see how many starfish there are? You'll never make a difference." The boy paused thoughtfully, and picked up another starfish and threw it into the ocean. "It sure made a difference to that one," he said. — Nicholas D. Kristof

You don't need to invade a place or install a new government to help bring about a positive change. — Nicholas D. Kristof

But they had learned an important lesson about how defeating poverty is more difficult than it seems at first. — Nicholas D. Kristof

A politically incorrect point must be noted here. Of the countries where women are held back and subjected to systematic abuses such as honor killings and genital cutting, a very large proportion are predominately Muslim. Most Muslims worldwide don't believe in such practices ... but the fact remains that the countries where girls are cut, killer for honor, or kept out of school or the workplace typically have large Muslim populations. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

You will be judged in years to come by how you responded to genocide on your watch. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

Here, in impoverished northern India state of Bihar, near the Nepalese border, there's not much else available commercially-- except sex. — Nicholas D. Kristof

It's time for a 21st-century abolitionist movement in the U.S and around the world. — Nicholas D. Kristof

Once you've created a connection of empathy, rational arguments can play a supportive role. — Nicholas D. Kristof

Even though we are peripheral to the slavery, our action is necessary to overcome a horrific evil. — Nicholas D. Kristof

Anybody who has spent time in Indian brothels and also, say, at Indian brick kilns knows that it is better to be enslaved working a kiln. Kiln workers most likely live together with their families, and their work does not expose them to the risk of AIDS, so there's always hope of escape down the road. — Nicholas D. Kristof

[referencing African girls with no medical care while giving birth and the devastating fistulas they are left with untreated] Instead of receiving treatment, these young girls--often just girls of fifteen or sixteen--typically find their lives effectively over. They are divorced from their husbands and, because they emit a terrible odor from their wastes, are often forced to live in a hut by themselves on the edge of the village. Eventually, they starve to death or die of an infection that progresses along the birth canal. The fistula patient is the modern-day leper," notes Ruth Kennedy, a British nurse-midwife. — Nicholas D. Kristof

Some security experts noted that the countries that nurture terrorists are disproportionally those where women are marginalized. The reason there are so many Muslim terrorists, they argued, has little to do with the Koran but a great deal to do with the lack of robust female participation in the economy and society of many Islamic countries. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

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

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

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

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

The implication of the sex ratios, Professor Sen found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today. Follow-up studies have calculated the number slightly differently, deriving alternative figures for 'missing women' of between 60 million and 101 million. Every year, at least another 2 million girls worldwide disappear because of gender discrimination. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

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

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

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

If poor [African] families spent only as much on educating their children as they do on beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor countries...What 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 by the father...One early pair of studies found that when women hold assets or gain incomes, family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine, and housing, and consequently children are healthier. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

There is an element of anger among women who've been raped. There's certainly a major element of humiliation. But it really does seem like a medical condition of shock and horror — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

Random violence is incredibly infectious. — Nicholas D. Kristof

A few countries like Sri Lanka and Honduras have led the way in slashing maternal mortality. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

I think it's dangerous to be optimistic. Things could go terribly wrong virtually overnight. — Nicholas D. Kristof

four appalling realities of daily life: maternal mortality, human trafficking, sexual violence, and the routine daily discrimination that causes girls to die at far higher rates than boys. The tools to address these challenges include girls' education, family planning, micro-finance, and "empowerment" in every sense. — Nicholas D. Kristof

Americans have called on moderates in Muslim countries to speak out against extremists, to stand up for the tolerance they say they believe in. We should all have the guts do the same at home. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

Americans of faith should try as hard to save the lives of African women as the lives of unborn fetuses. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

So let us be clear about this up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women's power as economic catalysts. That is the process under way - not a drama of victimization but of empowerment, the kind that transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen.
This is a story of transformation. It is change that is already taking place, and change that can accelerate if you'll just open your heart and join in. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

The equivalent of five jumbo jets' worth of women die in labor each day, but the issue is almost never covered. — Nicholas D. Kristof

Sexism and misogyny. How else to explain why so many more witches were burned than wizards? — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

Zach is part of an exploding movement of social entrepreneurs who offer new approaches to supporting women in the developing world. Aid workers function in the context of an aid bureaucracy, while social entrepreneurs create their own context by starting a new organization, company, or movement to address a social problem in a creative way. Social entrepreneurs tend not to have the traditional liberal suspicion of capitalism, and many charge for services and use a business model to achieve sustainability. 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. — Nicholas D. Kristof

If one is talking to a finance minister of a poor country, moral arguments tend not to get very far. But if you can argue that their country is going to grow 2 percent faster per year if they can just harness the power of the female half of the population more effectively, that is an argument they consider. — Nicholas D. Kristof

In much of the world, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is become pregnant. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

The intelligence community is so vast that more people have top secret clearance than live in Washington. The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined. — Nicholas D. Kristof

When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were routinely kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn't even consider it news. Partly that is because we journalists tend to be good at covering events that happen on a particular day, but we slip at covering events that happen every day - such as the quotidian cruelties inflicted on women and girls. We journalists weren't the only ones who dropped the ball on this subject: Less than 1 percent of U.S. foreign aid is specifically targeted to women and girls. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

It was in 1931 that the historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase "the American dream."
The American dream is not just a yearning for affluence, Adams said, but also for the chance to overcome barriers and social class, to become the best that we can be. Adams acknowledged that the United States didn't fully live up to that ideal, but he argued that America came closer than anywhere else. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence, it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains. But it's not true. Granted, men are often brutal to women. Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughter's genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take their sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

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

In Australia, they had never seen a single case of fistula; in Ethiopia, they encountered fistulas constantly. These are the women most to be pitied in the world. They're alone in the world, ashamed of their injuries. For lepers or AIDS victims, there are organizations that help. But nobody knows about these women or helps them. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

Of all the things that people do in the name of God, killing a girl because she doesn't bleed on her wedding night is among the most cruel. Yet the hymen
fragile, rarely seen, and pretty pointless
remains an object of worship among many religions and societies around the world ... it is frequently worth more than a human life. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

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

Let me be clear: I'm a believer in a robust military, which is essential for backing up diplomacy. But the implication is that we need a balanced tool chest of diplomatic and military tools alike. Instead, we have a billionaire military and a pauper diplomacy. The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service - and that's preposterous. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century. More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.
The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor each day ... life time risk of maternal death is 1,000x higher in a poor country than in the west. That should be an international scandal. — Nicholas D. Kristof

In many poor countries, the problem is not so much individual thugs and rapists but an entire culture of sexual predation. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

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

Environmental groups are too often alarmists. They have an awful track record, so they've lost credibility with the public. — Nicholas D. Kristof

In the long struggle against sex trafficking, we finally have a breakthrough! — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

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

The bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column. — Nicholas D. Kristof

The tide of history is turning women from beasts of burden and sexual playthings into full-fledged human beings. — Nicholas D. Kristof

The implicit social contract is that upper-class girls will keep their virtue, while young men will find satisfaction in the brothels. And the brothels will be staffed with slave girls trafficked from Nepal or Bangladesh or poor Indian villages. As long as the girls are uneducated, low-caste peasants like Meena, society will look the other way - just as many antebellum Americans turned away from the horrors of slavery because the people being lashed looked different from them. — Nicholas D. Kristof

Every year 3.1 million Indian children die before the age of 5, mostly from diseases of poverty like diarrhea. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

Conservatives, who have presumed that the key to preventing AIDS is abstinence-only education, and liberals, who have focused on distribution of condoms, should both note that the intervention that has tested most cost-effective in Africa is neither ... Secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

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

So Kim Kardashian is getting a divorce, 72 days after a wedding that is variously reported to have cost $10 million or more. Just to put that in perspective, that sum could have built 200 schools in poor countries around the world for kids who desperately want an education. Then Kardashian could have helped transform the world, not just entertain it. And the schools would have lasted incomparably longer than her marriage. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

One thing the humanitarian world doesn't do well is marketing. As a journalist, I get pitched every day by companies that have new products. Meanwhile, you have issues like clean water, literacy for girls, female empowerment. People flinch at the idea of marketing these because marketing sounds like something only companies do. — Nicholas D. Kristof

Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal health. — Nicholas D. Kristof

There are ten times as many sex slaves transported around the globe today as agrarian slaves were transported in the 1790s. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

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

Even in the United States, after all, what brought equal rights to blacks wasn't the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments passed after the Civil War, but rather the grassroots civil rights movement nearly one hundred years later. Laws matter, but typically changing the law by itself accomplishes little. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

Just a little help, a small security force, a bit of food, can save lives. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

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

Most studies find that each murder in America leads to costs of between $10 million and $12 million, including police and prison bills and social services for families of victims and perpetrators. The University of Chicago Crime Lab calculates that gun violence costs every Chicago household about $2,500 a year. Crime — Nicholas D. Kristof

Most of the villagers were hiding in the bush, where they were dying from bad water, malaria and malnutrition. — Nicholas D. Kristof

When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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