192 Quotes by Nicholas D. Kristof

The implicit social contract is that upper-class girls will keep their virtue, while young men will find satisfaction in the brothels. And the brothels will be staffed with slave girls trafficked from Nepal or Bangladesh or poor Indian villages. As long as the girls are uneducated, low-caste peasants like Meena, society will look the other way – just as many antebellum Americans turned away from the horrors of slavery because the people being lashed looked different from them.

We tie ourselves in knots when we act as if democracy is good for the United States and Israel but not for the Arab world. For far too long, we’ve treated the Arab world as just an oil field.

Leadership must come from the developing world itself, and that is beginning to happen. In India, Africa, and the Middle East, men and women alike are pushing for greater equality. These people need our support.

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.

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.

In 1792, 300,000 people boycotted sugar from the West Indies – the greatest consumer boycott in history until that point. That year, more people signed a petition against slavery than were eligible to vote in British elections.

Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal health.

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.

In strict Muslim countries such as Afghanistan, many young men have little hope of ever finding a partner. Typically in such nations, there are at least 3 percent more males than females, partly because females don’t receive the same medical care as males. Also, polygamy means that the wealthiest men take two or three wives, leaving even fewer women available for the poor. The inability of a young man to settle down in a family may increase the likelihood of his drifting toward violence.