Nicholas D. Kristof Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal health

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.

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.

Random violence is incredibly infectious

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

If you just try to make rational arguments about why people should care about Congo and how 5 million people have died, then people tend not to be receptive. But once you've created a connection of empathy, rational arguments can play a supportive role.

A little bit of attention can go a long way.

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

Our national leaders tend to try to protect the national interest as they see it. They may screw up in that, but they at least see that as their role. In contrast, where issues of our national values are involved, which covers pretty much any humanitarian issue, they pretty much drop the ball.

Isn't it time to talk not only about weather, but also about climate?

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

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