Quotes from Nicholas D. Kristof

Capitalism, it turns out, can achieve what charity and good intentions sometimes cannot. Microfinance has done more to bolster the status of women, and to protect them from abuse, than any laws could accomplish.

The government failed him, blamed him and jailed him. A couple of generations ago, the United States rewarded veterans by affording them education and housing benefits. More recently, the United States helped get veterans hooked on drugs and then incarcerated them.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937

Most studies find that each murder in America leads to costs of between $10 million and $12 million, including police and prison bills and social services for families of victims and perpetrators. The University of Chicago Crime Lab calculates that gun violence costs every Chicago household about $2,500 a year. Crime

Canadians and Europeans pay higher taxes and get universal health care, less poverty and homelessness, lower addiction rates and arguably more humane societies, and that's probably a worthwhile trade-off.

it's tragic that up to 40 percent of all pregnancies globally are unplanned or unwanted—and that almost half of those result in induced abortions. By some measures, more than one quarter of all maternal deaths could be avoided if there were no unplanned and unwanted pregnancies.

BY EVEN A CONSERVATIVE COUNT, there are more than half a million homeless people in America at any one time, including nearly two hundred thousand living on the streets rather than in shelters. Homelessness has increased in the last forty years even as America has become much wealthier, because of a confluence of factors. After World

the fracturing of our society is grounded not in the weaknesses of a particular leader but in the inability of our institutions to deliver meaningful social progress for the average citizen.

There's sometimes an impulse to pit the suffering of the white working class against that of African Americans or members of other minority groups. That is a mistake. Government policies have poorly served the working class of every complexion, and we need solidarity rather than strife among those so overlooked.

So, yes, teen births reflect individual irresponsibility, but also collective irresponsibility on the part of society. If we're going to blame the kids, we should also acknowledge our collective failure to do a better job creating safety nets so that teenagers overcome by hormones don't damage their futures, not to mention their children's

don't run away from a challenge because I am afraid. Instead, I run toward it because the only way to escape fear is to trample it beneath your feet. —NADIA COMANECI, Olympic gold medal gymnast

Imagine the outcry if the Pakistani or Indian governments were burning women alive at those rates. Yet when the government is not directly involved people shrug.

Repeated psychology experiments have shown that fear makes us more conservative in our political beliefs, and Richard Nixon seized upon the fears in 1968 when he ran for president with coded dog whistles playing on white apprehensions of black unrest.

Most of the kids who thrived came from stable, nurturing families attentive to education, while, as research would suggest, those who struggled came from homes with chaos, substance abuse and an indifference to schooling. The Jernstedts farmed grass seed and planted

As hostility toward government spread in America, there have been determined efforts to cut taxes, particularly for the wealthy, and then "starve the beast"--using reduced revenue to justify cuts in services for the disadvantaged. This is both disingenuous and cruel, as well as out of step with the advanced world.

The United States has about 13 million children living in poverty. Of those, about 2 million may live in "extreme poverty" by global definitions (in households earning less than about $2 per person per day), when looking at their cash incomes. These kids would be considered extremely poor if they lived in Congo or Bangladesh, yet they're here in the United States.

Here, in impoverished northern India state of Bihar, near the Nepalese border, there's not much else available commercially-- except sex.

Average hourly wages were actually lower in 2018 ($22.65) than they had been forty-five years earlier in 1973 ($23.68 in today's prices), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

It is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself up by his bootstraps. —DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

four appalling realities of daily life: maternal mortality, human trafficking, sexual violence, and the routine daily discrimination that causes girls to die at far higher rates than boys. The tools to address these challenges include girls' education, family planning, micro-finance, and "empowerment" in every sense.

1266What 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.

Anybody who has spent time in Indian brothels and also, say, at Indian brick kilns knows that it is better to be enslaved working a kiln. Kiln workers most likely live together with their families, and their work does not expose them to the risk of AIDS, so there's always hope of escape down the road.

four appalling realities of daily life: maternal mortality, human trafficking

But they had learned an important lesson about how defeating poverty is more difficult than it seems at first.