Nicholas D. Kristof Quotes

It's important not to demonize [Donald's] Trump voters.

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.

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.

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.

You could perhaps better tell the story of a place by writing of a tiny village as a sort of prism into the bigger issues the culture was facing. It struck me as a better way to learn about a place, or at least a different way, than just going to interview the president. So I have often tried to tell the story of a place through people there. But I'm just amazed.

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.

I have often tried to tell the story of a place through people there.

While Americans have heard of Darfur and think we should be doing more there, they aren't actually angry at the president about inaction

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In general, talking about human rights tends to be very persuasive for people who care about human rights.

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.

One of the principles of journalism is you don't lie. You never lie.

Laws matter, but typically changing the law by itself accomplishes little.

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

Guilt-tripping people does not work; they tend to be turned off.

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.

The trails are a reminder of our insignificance. We come and go, but nature is forever. It puts us in our place, underscoring that we are not lords of the universe but components of it...So when the world seems to be falling apart, when we humans seem to be creating messes everywhere we turn, maybe it's time to rejuvenate in the cathedral of the wilderness - and there, away from humanity, rediscover our own humanity.

It's easy to keep issuing blame to Republicans or the president

We all might ask ourselves why we tune in to these more trivial matters and tune out when it comes to Darfur

Random violence is incredibly infectious

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

China was probably the worst place in the world to grow up female 100 years ago. There was foot binding, female infanticide, concubinage, and child marriage, and now it's one of the better places. So I really do feel that we're on the right side of history here.

America's education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.

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

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.

I said that one can't stereotype [Donald] Trump voters anymore than they can anybody else.

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.

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.

I think when hundreds of thousands of lives are on the line, you might have to set aside some principles.

A little bit of attention can go a long way.

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.

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.

For most of history, genocide was just something governments did and nobody blinked.

Women aren't the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.

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.

Just a little help, a small security force, a bit of food, can save lives

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.

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

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

American airstrikes...create risks, especially if our intelligence there is rusty. The crucial step, and the one we should apply diplomatic pressure to try to achieve, is for Maliki to step back and share power with Sunnis while accepting decentralization of government. If Maliki does all that, it may still be possible to save Iraq. Without that, airstrikes would be a further waste in a land in which we've already squandered far, far too much.