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If one is talking to a finance minister of a poor country, moral arguments tend not to get very far. But if you can argue that their country is going to grow 2 percent faster per year if they can just harness the power of the female half of the population more effectively, that is an argument they consider.

Nicholas D. Kristof

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Nicholas D. Kristof
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More quotes by Nicholas D. Kristof

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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
Nicholas D. Kristof
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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.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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The tide of history is turning women from beasts of burden and sexual playthings into full-fledged human beings.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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Rising seas create a higher baseline for future storm surges. The New York City Panel on Climate Change has projected that coastal waters may rise by two feet by 2050 and four feet by the end of the century.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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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.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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The intelligence community is so vast that more people have top secret clearance than live in Washington. The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did... In contrast, legalizing and taxing marijuana would bring in substantial sums that could be used to pay for schools, libraries or early childhood education.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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Just a little help, a small security force, a bit of food, can save lives
Nicholas D. Kristof
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Americans of faith should try as hard to save the lives of African women as the lives of unborn fetuses.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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It is better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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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.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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I think that [Donald] Trump is frankly a bigot. He has a racist history.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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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.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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In general, talking about human rights tends to be very persuasive for people who care about human rights.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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A little bit of attention can go a long way.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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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.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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China was probably the worst place in the world to grow up female 100 years ago. There was foot binding, female infanticide, concubinage, and child marriage, and now it's one of the better places. So I really do feel that we're on the right side of history here.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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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.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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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
Nicholas D. Kristof
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A few countries like Sri Lanka and Honduras have led the way in slashing maternal mortality.
Nicholas D. Kristof