192 Quotes by Nicholas D. Kristof

There are 2-3 millions prostitutes in India, and although many of them now sell sex to some degree willingly, and are paid, a significant share of them entered the sex industry unwillingly.

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

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.

Throughout this book, we've tried to argue that America has gone astray by perceiving poverty or drugs simply as a choice or as the consequence of personal irresponsibility. Yet in another sense, poverty is a choice. It is a choice by the country. The United States has chosen policies over the last half century that have resulted in higher levels of homelessness, overdose deaths, crime and inequality--and now it's time to make a difference choice.

I went back to the women and said, 'Tell me exactly what you want us to do.' And they said, 'Don't do anything for us, do somethingfor our children'.

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.

Blacks routinely get the worst of it in the judicial process, particularly when they are poor...The United States sentencing commission found that blacks get sentences 19% longer than whites do, for the same offense, even after controlling for criminal history and other variables. The darker an African-American's complexion, the longer the sentence, researchers found. Blacks are also more likely to be found guilty and be sentenced to death.

Over the last fifty years, poverty has come to be seen not just as an economic failing but also as a moral one, prompting a pervasive suspicion that the poor are secretly living cushy lives on government benefits. A Pew poll found that wealthy Americans mostly agreed that "poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.

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