Top 100 Nicholas D. Kristof Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “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

52. “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

53. “The paradox of honor killings is that societies with the most rigid moral codes end up sanctioning behavior that is supremely immoral: murder.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

54. “Throughout this book, we’ve tried to argue that America has gone astray by perceiving poverty or drugs simply as a choice or as the consequence of personal irresponsibility. Yet in another sense, poverty is a choice. It is a choice by the country. The United States has chosen policies over the last half century that have resulted in higher levels of homelessness, overdose deaths, crime and inequality – and now it’s time to make a difference choice.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

55. “Once you’ve created a connection of empathy, rational arguments can play a supportive role.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

56. “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

57. “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

58. “People get away with enslaving village girls for the same reason that people got away with enslaving blacks two hundred years ago: The victims are perceived as discounted humans. India had delegated an intelligence officer to look for pirated goods because it knew that the United States cares about intellectual property. When India feels that the West cares as much about slavery as it does about pirated DVDs, it will dispatch people to the borders.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

59. “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.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

60. “It’s easy to keep issuing blame to Republicans or the president.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

61. “This is not a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women, but a messier realm of oppressive social customs adhered to by men and women alike. As we said, laws can help, but the greatest challenge is to change these ways of thinking.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

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

— Nicholas D. Kristof

63. “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 D. Kristof

64. “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

65. “People get away with enslaving village girls for the same reason that people got away with enslaving blacks two hundred years ago: The victims are perceived as discounted humans.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

66. “Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal health.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

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

— Nicholas D. Kristof

68. “In many poor countries, the problem is not so much individual thugs and rapists but an entire culture of sexual predation.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

69. “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

70. “Why does the United States spend more than $20 billion a year on farm programs but less than $4 billion a year on education and early care for children in the critical first two years of life? Are corn and soybeans really a higher priority for America’s future than our children?”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

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

— Nicholas D. Kristof

72. “Some degree of prostitution will probably always be with us, but we need not acquiesce to widespread sexual slavery.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

73. “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

74. “The first step toward better policy is to amend our understanding of people’s struggles so that it is less about individual irresponsibility and more about our collective irresponsibility in tolerating levels of child poverty that would be unacceptable in the rest of the developed world.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

75. “That has been the pattern again and again: With the best of intentions, pro-life conservatives have taken some positions in reproductive health that actually hurt those whom they are trying to help – and that result in more abortions.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

76. “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

77. “The news media’s silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

78. “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

79. “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

80. “What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. – MARK TWAIN.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

81. “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

82. “The challenge today is to prod the world to face up to women locked in brothels and teenage girls with fistulas curled up on the floor of isolated huts. We hope to see a broad movement emerge to battle gender inequality around the world and to push for education and opportunities for girls around the world.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

83. “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

84. “Over the last fifty years, poverty has come to be seen not just as an economic failing but also as a moral one, prompting a pervasive suspicion that the poor are secretly living cushy lives on government benefits. A Pew poll found that wealthy Americans mostly agreed that “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

85. “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

86. “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

87. “In strict Muslim countries such as Afghanistan, many young men have little hope of ever finding a partner. Typically in such nations, there are at least 3 percent more males than females, partly because females don’t receive the same medical care as males. Also, polygamy means that the wealthiest men take two or three wives, leaving even fewer women available for the poor. The inability of a young man to settle down in a family may increase the likelihood of his drifting toward violence.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

88. “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

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

— Nicholas D. Kristof

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

— Nicholas D. Kristof

91. “Why do foreigners always ask about clothing?” one woman doctor asked. “Why does it matter so much what we wear? Of all the issues in the world, is that really so important?” Another said: “You think we’re victims, because we cover our hair and wear modest clothing. But we think that it’s Western women who are repressed, because they have to show their bodies – even go through surgery to change their bodies – to please men.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

92. “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

93. “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

94. “One of the most infuriating elements of American myopia about investing in at-risk kids is that politicians often insist that they don’t have the funds to pay for social services – but they somehow find the resources to pay for prisons later on.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

95. “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 the father.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

96. “The bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof

97. “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

98. “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

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

— Nicholas D. Kristof

100. “It really is quite remarkable that Darfur has become a household name. I am gratified that’s the case.”

— Nicholas D. Kristof