Best 100 quotes of Nicholas D. Kristof on MyQuotes

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.

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

A little bit of attention can go a long way.

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.

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.

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.

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

Compassion isn't a sign of weakness, but a mark of civilization.

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.

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

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

Half a million women die each year around the world in pregnancy. It's not biology that kills them so much as neglect.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

In the long struggle against sex trafficking, we finally have a breakthrough!

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

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

I think it's dangerous to be optimistic.

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

I think that [Donald] Trump is frankly a bigot. He has a racist history.

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.

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

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

It’s time for a 21st-century abolitionist movement in the U.S and around the world.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal health

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Random violence is incredibly infectious

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.