Top 95 Nicholas Kristof Quotes

Remember that disadvantage is less about income than environment. The best metrics of child poverty aren’t monetary, but rather how often a child is read to or hugged.

The ice bucket challenge went viral in 2014, partly because it was so much fun to watch videos of celebrities or friends dumping ice water on their heads. Videos of people in the challenge have been watched more than 10 billion times on Facebook – more than once per person on the planet.

Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal health.

There’s something to be said for CEOs’ entering politics: In theory, they have management expertise and financial savvy. Then again, it didn’t work so well with Dick Cheney.

I think humanitarian organizations should acknowledge the progress more than they do. I think that one reason people are reluctant to provide more help to Africa, for example, is this sense that it’s just hopeless, in a way that I think is untrue.

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

The Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest shrine, is in northwestern India near the Pakistani border, and it is a delightful place to contemplate the draw of faith.

Beware of generalizations about any faith because they sometimes amount to the religious equivalent of racial profiling. Hinduism contained both Gandhi and the fanatic who assassinated him.

The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.

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

Sure, food stamps are occasionally misused, but anyone familiar with business knows that the abuse of food subsidies is far greater in the corporate suite. Every time an executive wines and dines a hot date on the corporate dime, the average taxpayer helps foot the bill.

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.

Anybody looking at the history even of the 20th century would not single out Islam as the bloodthirsty religion; it was Christian/Nazi/Communist Europe and Buddhist/Taoist/Hindu/atheist Asia that set records for mass slaughter.

A basic element of the American dream is equal access to education as the lubricant of social and economic mobility.

I was the first blogger on the Times’s website. That happened during the Iraq war, when I wanted an outlet for the things I was seeing every day that couldn’t fit into just two columns a week. Then I became interested in using multimedia, specifically as a way to engage young people.

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.

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.

If I wanted a circus ringmaster, I’d hire Trump. If I wanted advice on brain surgery or hospital management, I’d turn to Carson. Fiorina would make an articulate television pundit. But for president?

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

I think we in journalism were really late to social networks. We had a built-in network already in terms of our readers, and we didn’t capitalize on that.

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

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

In effect, Saudi Arabia legitimizes fundamentalism, religious discrimination, intolerance and the oppression of women. Saudi women not only can’t drive, but are also told by some clerics that they mustn’t wear seatbelts for fear of showing the outlines of their bodies.

It’s maddening in my travels to watch children dying simply because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Zimbabwe has far fewer tourists than South Africa or Kenya, and there’s less crime as well.

A little bit of attention can go a long way.

Random violence is incredibly infectious.

Seniors vote, and that is why we have, you know, Medicare since the 1960s for seniors, and we didn’t have a national healthcare program for children, even though it’s a lot more cost-effective to deal with children than with seniors.

If only meat weren’t so delicious! Sure, meat may pave the way to a heart attack. Yes, factory farms torture animals. Indeed, producing a single hamburger patty requires more water than two weeks of showers. But for those of us who are weak-willed, there’s nothing like a juicy burger.

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.

My take is that the optimal approach to food, for health and ethical reasons, may be vegetarianism.

Climate change is hugely exacerbated by changing patterns of how we choose to live, often in danger zones such as extremely vulnerable coastal zones – from New Jersey to the Philippines. This enormously increases the economic and human costs of hurricanes, rising seas and changing weather patterns.

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

Girls’ education is no silver bullet. Iran and Saudi Arabia have both educated girls but refused to empower them, so both remain mired in the past. But when a country educates and unleashes women, those educated women often become force multipliers for good.

During the Arab Spring, I learned all sorts of things from Twitter. I wouldn’t necessarily trust that information, but it gave me ideas about questions to ask. You can really learn things from the wisdom of crowds.

Conservatives highlight the primacy of family and argue that family breakdown exacerbates poverty, and they’re right. Children raised by single parents are three times as likely to live in poverty as kids in two-parent homes.

My father, a refugee from Eastern Europe, was preparing a fraudulent marriage to an American citizen as a route to this country when he was sponsored, making fraud unnecessary. My wife’s grandfather bought papers from another Chinese villager to be able to come to the United States.

The greatest problem is not with flat-out white racists, but rather with the far larger number of Americans who believe intellectually in racial equality but are quietly oblivious to injustice around them.

I can’t help thinking that if the American West were discovered today, the most glorious bits would be sold off to the highest bidder. Yosemite might be nothing but weekend homes for Internet tycoons.

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

Things that happen every day are, frankly, what we in the news business aren’t good at covering because there is no one day in which they are news.

However imperfectly, subsidies for the poor do actually reduce hunger, ease suffering and create opportunity, while subsidies for the rich result in more private jets and yachts. Would we rather subsidize opportunity or yachts? Which kind of subsidies deserve more scrutiny?

Our world is enriched when coders and marketers dazzle us with smartphones and tablets, but, by themselves, they are just slabs. It is the music, essays, entertainment and provocations that they access, spawned by the humanities, that animate them – and us.

I’m sometimes embarrassed by how clinical I can become when I’m out reporting.

Most moms and dads, they want to be good moms and dads. But it’s an incredibly hard job when you are stressed out, when you are poor, when your life is in chaos. And giving them some of the tools to be better parents, to whittle away at that parenting gap, gives those kids a much better starting point in life.

Traditionally, what we in the news business do is cover what happened yesterday.

Saudi Arabia inflames the Sunni-Shiite divide and sets a pernicious example of intolerance by banning churches.

When I was growing up, yearning with my pals to be a track star, one of our heroes was Bruce Jenner. He won a gold medal at the 1976 Olympics in the decathlon, and he adorned our Wheaties boxes. We all wanted to be Bruce Jenner.

Our public figures are often narcissists, utterly self-absorbed in their quest for power.

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.

Maybe our best family trip started at Victoria Falls, which drenches you with spray and is so vast that it makes Niagara Falls seem like a backyard creek. Then we rented a car and made our way to Hwange National Park, which was empty of people but crowded with zebras, giraffes, elephants and more.