Quotes from Nicholas D. Kristof

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.

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.

It was in 1931 that the historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase "the American dream." The American dream is not just a yearning for affluence, Adams said, but also for the chance to overcome barriers and social class, to become the best that we can be. Adams acknowledged that the United States didn't fully live up to that ideal, but he argued that America came closer than anywhere else.

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.

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.

The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. 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. In

As a society, we denounce delinquents, hoodlums and hooligans, but the truth is that we routinely fail troubled kids before they fail us. More children die each year in the United States from abuse and neglect than from cancer. For every child who dies, thousands are injured, raped or brutally abused. We shrug as millions of children undergo trauma in ways that harm them and unravel our social fabric--and then we blame the kids when things go wrong.

Women might just have something to contribute to civilization other than their vaginas. —CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY, Florence of Arabia

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

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

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

There is an element of anger among women who've been raped. There's certainly a major element of humiliation. But it really does seem like a medical condition of shock and horror.

Guilt-tripping people does not work; they tend to be turned off.

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.

Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal health.

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

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

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.

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.

There is an element of anger among women who've been raped. There's certainly a major element of humiliation. But it really does seem like a medical condition of shock and horror.

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

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

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.

sex trafficking and mass rape should no more be seen as women's issues than slavery was a black issue or the Holocaust was a Jewish issue.