Quotes from Nicholas D. Kristof

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.

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

You don't need to invade a place or install a new government to help bring about a positive change.

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

For most of history, genocide was just something governments did and nobody blinked.

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

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

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

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.

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.

A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back into the water. "What are you doing, son?" the man asks. "You see how many starfish there are? You'll never make a difference." The boy paused thoughtfully, and picked up another starfish and threw it into the ocean. "It sure made a difference to that one," he said.

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

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.

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.

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

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

You educate a boy, and you're educating an individual. You educate a girl, and you're educating a village. -African Proverb

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.

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.

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. —MARK TWAIN

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

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

When women gain a voice in society, there's evidence of less violence.

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.