Top 100 Nicholas D. Kristof Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

2. “It is better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

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

— Nicholas D. Kristof

4. “Just a little help, a small security force, a bit of food, can save lives.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

5. “The conflict in Darfur could escalate to where we’re seeing 100,000 victims per month.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

6. “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

7. “Compassion isn’t a sign of weakness, but a mark of civilization.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

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

— Nicholas D. Kristof

9. “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

10. “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

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

— Nicholas D. Kristof

12. “A little bit of attention can go a long way.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

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

— Nicholas D. Kristof

14. “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

15. “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. – FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, State of the Union Address, 1944.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

16. “It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine “gendercide” in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “Women might just have something to contribute to civilization other than their vaginas. – CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY, Florence of Arabia.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

22. “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

23. “Random violence is incredibly infectious.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

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

— Nicholas D. Kristof

25. “Teaching in a village school in Nepal was a freaking piece of cake compared to teaching in my native land.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

26. “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

27. “In general, the best clue to a nation’s growth and development potential is the status and role of women. This is the greatest handicap of Muslim Middle Eastern societies today, the flaw that most bars them from modernity.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

28. “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

29. “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

30. “The greatest threat to extremism isn’t drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

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

— Nicholas D. Kristof

32. “When women gain a voice in society, there’s evidence of less violence.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

33. “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

34. “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

35. “Isn’t it time to talk not only about weather, but also about climate?”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

36. “The world spends $40 billion a year on pet food.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

37. “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

38. “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

39. “Most of us employ the Internet not to seek the best information, but rather to select information that confirms our prejudices .”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

40. “You don’t need to invade a place or install a new government to help bring about a positive change.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

41. “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

42. “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

43. “In 1792, 300,000 people boycotted sugar from the West Indies – the greatest consumer boycott in history until that point. That year, more people signed a petition against slavery than were eligible to vote in British elections.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

44. “Every year 3.1 million Indian children die before the age of 5, mostly from diseases of poverty like diarrhea.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

45. “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

46. “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

47. “Most of the villagers were hiding in the bush, where they were dying from bad water, malaria and malnutrition.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

48. “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

49. “I think it’s dangerous to be optimistic. Things could go terribly wrong virtually overnight.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

50. “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