Nicholas D. Kristof Quotes (42 Quotes)

Every year 3.1 million Indian children die before the age of 5, mostly from diseases of poverty like diarrhea.

You will be judged in years to come by how you responded to genocide on your watch.

There seems to be this sense among even well-meaning Americans that Africa is this black hole of murder and mutilation that can never be fixed, no matter what aid is brought in.

Random violence is incredibly infectious.

If Africa could establish a clothing export industry, that would fight poverty far more effectively than any foreign aid program.

I think it's dangerous to be optimistic. Things could go terribly wrong virtually overnight.

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

A few countries like Sri Lanka and Honduras have led the way in slashing maternal mortality.

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.

We all might ask ourselves why we tune in to these more trivial matters and tune out when it comes to Darfur.

If President Bush is serious about genocide, an immediate priority is to stop the cancer of Darfur from spreading further, which means working with France to shore up Chad and the Central African Republic.

While Americans have heard of Darfur and think we should be doing more there, they aren't actually angry at the president about inaction.

You could perhaps better tell the story of a place by writing of a tiny village as a sort of prism into the bigger issues the culture was facing.

It's easy to keep issuing blame to Republicans or the president.

As soon as I was old enough to drive, I got a job at a local newspaper. There was someone who influenced me. He wrote a column for The Guardian from this tiny village in India.

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.

The bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column.

Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal health.

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.

Most of the villagers were hiding in the bush, where they were dying from bad water, malaria and malnutrition.

There isn't a political price to be paid yet for doing nothing. People need to get upset with President Bush. People need to get upset with their Congressmen.

It really is quite remarkable that Darfur has become a household name. I am gratified that's the case.

The world spends $40 billion a year on pet food.

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 erupted.

The north of the Central African Republic is now a war zone, with rival armed bands burning villages, kidnapping children, robbing travelers and killing people with impunity.

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.

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

I've gotten dangerously close to the line by talking policy with politicians, by making direct appeals to readers to act. But lives are on the line.

A little bit of attention can go a long way.

The conflict in Darfur could escalate to where we're seeing 100,000 victims per month.

I have often tried to tell the story of a place through people there.

The photos were taken by African Union soldiers. People in Congress saw them. I thought if people could see them, there would be public outcry. No one would be able to say, We just didn't know what was going on there.

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female.

I try to be careful about wording. One of the things I've tried to combat in my blog is the notion that journalists are arrogant and unconcerned with the readership.

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.

Recently President Bush struck down the Sudan Accountability Act, which would hold accountable those who perpetrated these atrocities.

The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing.

All of a sudden their husband's dead and maybe a child is dead and they have absolutely nothing - and they're heading through the desert at night.

One of the things that really got to me was talking to parents who had been burned out of their villages, had family members killed, and then when men showed up at the wells to get water, they were shot.

The degree to which these people were willing to share the little they had, did make me feel rather guilty about not doing more for them.

Half a million women die each year around the world in pregnancy. It's not biology that kills them so much as neglect.

You would see people going back to homes that had been burned, putting thatch over their structures again. They still couldn't leave the area without the danger of men being killed or women being raped, but it was a start.