Nicholas D. Kristof
The greatest threat to extremism isn't drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.Collection: Girl
Most of us employ the Internet not to seek the best information, but rather to select information that confirms our prejudices .Collection: Prejudice
I think that [Donald] Trump is frankly a bigot. He has a racist history.Collection: Thinking
If only women are talking about women's rights, then the issue has failed from the start. If you think about the Holocaust, that wasn't just a Jewish issue. Civil rights weren't just a black issue.Collection: Thinking
When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. 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.Collection: Mother
Women aren't the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.Collection: Girl
So let us be clear about this up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women's power as economic catalysts. That is the process under way - not a drama of victimization but of empowerment, the kind that transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen. This is a story of transformation. It is change that is already taking place, and change that can accelerate if you'll just open your heart and join in.Collection: Girl
We, as Americans, have won the lottery of life and the distinction between us and people living in Kalighat is not that we are smarter, not that we're harder working, not that we're more virtuous - it's that we're luckier.Collection: People
Once you've created a connection of empathy, rational arguments can play a supportive role.Collection: Play
The way you get leaders to care about issues of conscience is to apply political pressure. It's less a question of persuading leaders directly and more trying to build a social movement that holds their feet to the fire.Collection: Feet
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.Collection: Believe
In general, talking about human rights tends to be very persuasive for people who care about human rights.Collection: Rights
The tide of history is turning women from beasts of burden and sexual playthings into full-fledged human beings.Collection: Tides
...Environmental groups are too often alarmists. They have an awful track record, so they've lost credibility with the public.Collection: Track
It is better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none.Collection: Diplomacy
If the U.S. wants to help people in tsunami-hit countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia - not to mention other poor countries in Africa - there's one step that would cost us nothing and would save hundreds of thousands of lives. It would be to allow DDT in malaria-ravaged countries.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Girl
In the long struggle against sex trafficking, we finally have a breakthrough!Collection: Sex
One thing the humanitarian world doesn't do well is marketing. As a journalist, I get pitched every day by companies that have new products. Meanwhile, you have issues like clean water, literacy for girls, female empowerment. People flinch at the idea of marketing these because marketing sounds like something only companies do.Collection: Girl
For most of history, genocide was just something governments did and nobody blinked.Collection: Genocide
Photographs are still being taken but aren't being shown. There's one of a skeleton bound at the wrists with pants still around its ankles; if it was a woman, she was likely raped; if it was a man, he was possibly castrated.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Home
Americans of faith should try as hard to save the lives of African women as the lives of unborn fetuses.Collection: Trying
America's education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.Collection: Opportunity
Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did... In contrast, legalizing and taxing marijuana would bring in substantial sums that could be used to pay for schools, libraries or early childhood education.Collection: School
Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal healthCollection: Left
So Kim Kardashian is getting a divorce, 72 days after a wedding that is variously reported to have cost $10 million or more. Just to put that in perspective, that sum could have built 200 schools in poor countries around the world for kids who desperately want an education. Then Kardashian could have helped transform the world, not just entertain it. And the schools would have lasted incomparably longer than her marriage.Collection: Country
The intelligence community is so vast that more people have top secret clearance than live in Washington. The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.Collection: War
Random violence is incredibly infectiousCollection: Random Violence
The trails are a reminder of our insignificance. We come and go, but nature is forever. It puts us in our place, underscoring that we are not lords of the universe but components of it...So when the world seems to be falling apart, when we humans seem to be creating messes everywhere we turn, maybe it's time to rejuvenate in the cathedral of the wilderness - and there, away from humanity, rediscover our own humanity.Collection: Fall
The equivalent of five jumbo jets' worth of women die in labor each day, but the issue is almost never covered.Collection: Issues
Look, we'll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.Collection: Education
More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.Collection: Suicide
It's easy to keep issuing blame to Republicans or the presidentCollection: President
Sandy was particularly destructive because it was prevented from moving back out to sea by a "blocking pattern" associated with the jet stream. There's debate about this, but one recent study suggested that melting sea ice in the Arctic may lead to such blocking.Collection: Block
I think it's dangerous to be optimistic. Things could go terribly wrong virtually overnightCollection: Optimistic
If you just try to make rational arguments about why people should care about Congo and how 5 million people have died, then people tend not to be receptive. But once you've created a connection of empathy, rational arguments can play a supportive role.Collection: People
I said that one can't stereotype [Donald] Trump voters anymore than they can anybody else.Collection: Voters
Our national leaders tend to try to protect the national interest as they see it. They may screw up in that, but they at least see that as their role. In contrast, where issues of our national values are involved, which covers pretty much any humanitarian issue, they pretty much drop the ball.Collection: Leader
Isn't it time to talk not only about weather, but also about climate?Collection: Weather
There are ten times as many sex slaves transported around the globe today as agrarian slaves were transported in the 1790s.Collection: Sex
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 fundingCollection: Cutting
While Americans have heard of Darfur and think we should be doing more there, they aren't actually angry at the president about inactionCollection: Thinking
Rising seas create a higher baseline for future storm surges. The New York City Panel on Climate Change has projected that coastal waters may rise by two feet by 2050 and four feet by the end of the century.Collection: New York
Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and femaleCollection: Country
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 eruptedCollection: Issues
Most of the villagers were hiding in the bush, where they were dying from bad water, malaria and malnutritionCollection: Water
American airstrikes...create risks, especially if our intelligence there is rusty. The crucial step, and the one we should apply diplomatic pressure to try to achieve, is for Maliki to step back and share power with Sunnis while accepting decentralization of government. If Maliki does all that, it may still be possible to save Iraq. Without that, airstrikes would be a further waste in a land in which we've already squandered far, far too much.Collection: Military
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.Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: Religious