Quotes from Nicholas D. Kristof

Some 68,000 Americans now die annually from drug overdoses, another 88,000 from alcohol abuse and 47,000 from suicide. More Americans die from these causes every two weeks than died during eighteen years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The enemy of our country is poverty and hopelessness.

We're number 1!" and in terms of overall economic and military strength, we are.

Our political system responds to large donors, so politicians create benefits for the rich, who then reward the politicians who created them. How different is this from the symbiosis in the Middle Ages between a king and the nobility, elevating aristocrats who repressed the peasantry at the same time that they hailed their own magnanimity and rolled their eyes at the peasants' morals?

The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention.

What we saw was a tragedy not just for one family, for the country cannot achieve its potential when so many citizens are not reaching theirs.

Some 60 million Americans live in a rural America that is suffering, and the U.S. political architecture gives the frustrations of these rural Americans disproportionate political influence.

Yet once he was in office, Trump cold-shouldered the working-class voters who had supported him. He gave lip service to jobs in coal and manufacturing but took no significant step to assist workers, and he made things worse by chipping away at the Affordable Care Act. It was one more scene in a long drama of politicians' betrayal of America's working class.

They decided not to touch the quarter-million dollars in the GoFundMe account, aside from 10 percent that they would give to their church as a tithe. The rest went into a new Tanitoluwa Adewumi Foundation to be used to help struggling immigrants like the ones

America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system. —WALTER CRONKITE, former anchor for CBS Evening News

Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution have found that of people who follow three traditional rules—graduate from high school, get a full-time job and marry before having children—only 2 percent live in poverty. So play by these rules, called "the success sequence," and by and large one can avoid poverty. In contrast, of those who do none of those three things, 79 percent live in poverty.

In many poor countries, the problem is not so much individual thugs and rapists but an entire culture of sexual predation.

That sense of degradation, of being labeled inferior, is a central feature of the whirlpool of the working poor. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen has said that shame is the "irreducible absolutist core" of the experience of poverty. Poverty is about not just income but also humiliation, social exclusion, the stress of being forever lower on the social ladder.

Robert Kennedy spoke shortly before his death about the damage to a society caused by "the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men," by "indifference and inaction and slow decay" and by "a slow destruction of children." Kennedy added that "only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our souls.

As for wife beating, one survey found support for it from 62 percent of Indian village women themselves. And no group systematically abuses young women more cruelly than mothers-in-law, who serve as household matriarchs in much of the world and take charge of disciplining the younger women.

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 different choice.

The United Nations has estimated that there are 5,000 honor killings a year, almost all in the Muslim world. But that estimate appears too low, because so many of the executions are disguised as accidents or suicides.

In Australia, they had never seen a single case of fistula; in Ethiopia, they encountered fistulas constantly. These are the women most to be pitied in the world. They're alone in the world, ashamed of their injuries. For lepers or AIDS victims, there are organizations that help. But nobody knows about these women or helps them.

The people in Roseto smoked, drank and ate fatty sausages, but they didn't have heart attacks, and this protective influence of a close-knit community on mortality is called the Roseto Effect.

A politically incorrect point must be noted here. Of the countries where women are held back and subjected to systematic abuses such as honor killings and genital cutting, a very large proportion are predominately Muslim. Most Muslims worldwide don't believe in such practices...but the fact remains that the countries where girls are cut, killer for honor, or kept out of school or the workplace typically have large Muslim populations.

Americans used to extol good-hearted Robin Hood, taking from the rich to give to the poor, and now we've stepped into the shoes of the Sheriff of Nottingham. When as a society we shrug at 30 million children living in low-income families in America, slashing their benefits while urging them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, we need to look in the mirror and have a good talk with ourselves.

We asked about the utilities, and Christine said proudly that the electricity was working, even though she hasn't paid the bills.

Something about reproductive health makes politicians and local officials lose their reasoning faculties. State education officials and local school board members know that teen pregnancy is a huge problem, yet they often refuse to allow teaching to avoid it. Just eighteen states require schools to reach birth control, and only about half of American kids receive any classroom instruction in contraception before the first time they have sex, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

We believe an international women's movement needs to focus less on holding conventions or lobbying for new laws, and more time in places like rural Zimbabwe, listening to communities and helping them get their girls into school.