192 Quotes by Nicholas D. Kristof

In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence, it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains. But it’s not true. Granted, men are often brutal to women. Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughter’s genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take their sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination.

Of all the things that people do in the name of God, killing a girl because she doesn’t bleed on her wedding night is among the most cruel. Yet the hymen – fragile, rarely seen, and pretty pointless – remains an object of worship among many religions and societies around the world... it is frequently worth more than a human life.

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

In the wealthy countries of the West, discrimination is usually a matter of unequal pay or underfunded sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss. In contrast, in much of the world discrimination is lethal.

The challenge today is to prod the world to face up to women locked in brothels and teenage girls with fistulas curled up on the floor of isolated huts. We hope to see a broad movement emerge to battle gender inequality around the world and to push for education and opportunities for girls around the world.

In India, a “bride burning” – to punish a woman for inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry – takes place approximately once every two hours, but rarely constitute news.

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.

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.

In general, the best clue to a nation’s growth and development potential is the status and role of women. This is the greatest handicap of Muslim Middle Eastern societies today, the flaw that most bars them from modernity.