192 Quotes by Nicholas D. Kristof

It was in 1931 that the historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “the American dream.”The American dream is not just a yearning for affluence, Adams said, but also for the chance to overcome barriers and social class, to become the best that we can be. Adams acknowledged that the United States didn’t fully live up to that ideal, but he argued that America came closer than anywhere else.

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 tide of history is turning women from beasts of burden and sexual playthings into full-fledged human beings.

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.

As a society, we denounce "delinquents," "hoodlums" and "hooligans," but the truth is that we routinely fail troubled kids before they fail us. More children die each year in the United States from abuse and neglect than from cancer. For every child who dies, thousands are injured, raped or brutally abused. We shrug as millions of children undergo trauma in ways that harm them and unravel our social fabric--and then we blame the kids when things go wrong.

One of the most infuriating elements of American myopia about investing in at-risk kids is that politicians often insist that they don't have the funds to pay for social services--but they somehow find the resources to pay for prisons later on.

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.

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.

Even though we are peripheral to the slavery, our action is necessary to overcome a horrific evil.