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I think it's dangerous to be optimistic.

Nicholas D. Kristof

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Nicholas D. Kristof
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More quotes by 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 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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Solar power is one of the most hopeful technologies but still produces about 0.01 percent of U.S. electricity. The U.S. allocates just $159 million for solar research per year - about what we spend in Iraq every nine hours.
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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Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female
Nicholas D. Kristof
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I think when hundreds of thousands of lives are on the line, you might have to set aside some principles.
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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There isn't a political price to be paid yet for doing nothing. People need to get upset with President Bush. People need to get upset with their Congressmen.
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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The photos were taken by African Union soldiers. People in Congress saw them. I thought if people could see them, there would be public outcry. No one would be able to say, We just didn't know what was going on there.
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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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.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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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.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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The greatest threat to extremism isn't drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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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.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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If President Bush is serious about genocide, an immediate priority is to stop the cancer of Darfur from spreading further, which means working with France to shore up Chad and the Central African Republic.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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We all might ask ourselves why we tune in to these more trivial matters and tune out when it comes to Darfur
Nicholas D. Kristof
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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.
Nicholas D. Kristof
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The U.N. Population Fund has a maternal health program in some Cameroon hospitals, but it doesn't operate in this region. It's difficult to expand, because President Bush has cut funding
Nicholas D. Kristof
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Photographs are still being taken but aren't being shown. There's one of a skeleton bound at the wrists with pants still around its ankles if it was a woman, she was likely raped if it was a man, he was possibly castrated.
Nicholas D. Kristof