Quotes from Nicholas D. Kristof

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.

The unfortunate reality is that women's issues are marginalized, and in any case 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. These are all humanitarian concerns, transcending any one race, gender, or creed.

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.

Philanthropists and donors traditionally haven't been sufficiently interested in women's rights abroad, giving money instead to higher brow causes such as the ballet or art museums. 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.

There are 2-3 millions prostitutes in India, and although many of them now sell sex to some degree willingly, and are paid, a significant share of them entered the sex industry unwillingly.

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.

Teaching in a village school in Nepal was a freaking piece of cake compared to teaching in my native land.

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.

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.

your book is full of piquant ideas on how sexual assault is practiced by many people but in African countries the issue is pressurized by females themselves as they tend to dress on night attires as a result males are piquant ed to commit an offense

The child mortality revolution has used vaccines, treatments for diarrhea, micronutrients, and improved nutrition to reduce the number of child deaths worldwide each year from 20 million in 1960 to 6.6 million today—even as the number of children has risen.

Often we blame a region's religion when the oppression instead may be rooted in its culture. Yet, that acknowledged, it's also true that . . . it is often cited by the oppressors.

The public frets about cheating with food stamps (the fraud rate is about 1.5 percent) yet doesn't understand that zillionaires hide assets abroad and thereby deprive the Treasury of some $36 billion a year in taxes—enough to pay for high-quality pre-K and day care for all.

Other countries over the decades expanded health-care coverage, adopted family-leave policies, extended mass transit and implemented child allowances to reduce poverty, while the United States bucked the trend by slashing taxes, cutting back hours at public libraries, raising tuition at state universities and allowing infrastructure to decay.

As went Yamhill, so went much of white, working-class America. One of the strongest predictors of support for Trump in any county was the share of whites with just a high-school diploma or less.

As a fraction of GDP, the United States spends on job-training and assistance programs barely one-fifth as much as the average among industrialized countries. Moreover, the United States has significantly cut spending on these programs in recent decades, while significantly increasing spending on prisons instead.

In 1792, 300,000 people boycotted sugar from the West Indies—the greatest consumer boycott in history until that point. That year, more people signed a petition against slavery than were eligible to vote in British elections.

The gains in wealth and income have gone largely to a tiny share of the population, as is common knowledge by now. The people in the top 0.1 percent did fantastically well after 1980, those in the top 1 percent did very well, those below them in the top 10 percent enjoyed incomes growing at the same pace as the economy and those in the bottom 90 percent all lost ground—their incomes grew more slowly than the overall economy—during the last four decades.

the single most important way to encourage women and girls to stand up for their rights is education, and we can do far more to promote universal education in poor countries.

Would the world stand by if it were men who were dying just for completing their reproductive functions? —ASHA-ROSE MIGIRO, UN DEPUTY SECRETARY GENERAL, 2007

United Nations Development Programme but may be an

Blacks routinely get the worst of it in the judicial process, particularly when they are poor... The United States sentencing commission found that blacks get sentences 19% longer than whites do, for the same offense, even after controlling for criminal history and other variables. The darker an African-American's complexion, the longer the sentence, researchers found. Blacks are also more likely to be found guilty and be sentenced to death.

United Nations report claims that 90 percent of girls and women over the age of three were sexually abused in parts of Liberia during civil war there.

One 2008 study of Indian brothels found that of Indian and Nepali prostitutes who started as teenagers, about half said they had been coerced into the brothels; women who began working in their twenties were more likely to have made the choice themselves, often to feed their children.