Quotes by Nicholas Kristof

“[In] The Larger Shame, ... The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering . . . in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh s government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens.”

“Its an issue that I have been interested in writing about,”

“I didnt just want to sit and suck my thumb and write.”

“Not only have you been completely shamed, you have shamed your entire family. And the way to wipe that out is to commit suicide. And thats the expectation across rural Pakistan.”

“Youll have to leave your studio, Bill. Youll encounter pure evil. If youre like me, youll be scared ... and youll finally be using your talents for an important cause.”

“I cant get these images out of my mind.”

“They were getting no international help; no aid had arrived.”

“The only way, in turn, for us to assert our own humanity is to stand up to it, and that is precisely what Im afraid we are not doing now.”

moral voices can also become sanctimonious bullies.

America’s education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.

When we have a narrative in mind, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it.

Most moms and dads, they want to be good moms and dads. But its an incredibly hard job when you are stressed out, when you are poor, when your life is in chaos. And giving them some of the tools to be better parents, to whittle away at that parenting gap, gives those kids a much better starting point in life.

Wilderness trails constitute a rare space in America marked by economic diversity. Lawyers and construction workers get bitten by the same mosquitoes and sip from the same streams; there are none of the usual signals about socioeconomic status, for most hikers are in shorts and a T-shirt and enveloped by an aroma that would make a skunk queasy.

What use could the humanities be in a digital age? University students focusing on the humanities may end up, at least in their parents nightmares, as dog-walkers for those majoring in computer science. But, for me, the humanities are not only relevant but also give us a toolbox to think seriously about ourselves and the world.

The greatest problem is not with flat-out white racists, but rather with the far larger number of Americans who believe intellectually in racial equality but are quietly oblivious to injustice around them.

Our world is enriched when coders and marketers dazzle us with smartphones and tablets, but, by themselves, they are just slabs. It is the music, essays, entertainment and provocations that they access, spawned by the humanities, that animate them - and us.

Every high school and college graduate in America should, I think, have some familiarity with statistics, economics and a foreign language such as Spanish. Religion may not be as indispensable, but the humanities should be a part of our repertory. They may not enrich our wallets, but they do enrich our lives. They civilize us. They provide context.

I think we need to rethink a lot of business skills. In finance, for example, social impact bonds are potentially a way of providing capital for investments that save the public money in a context in which government often doesnt invest in things that would save it money.

Ive always been interested in public health approaches because it seems to me we have this yearning for silver bullets, and that is not in fact how change comes about. Change comes through silver buckshot - a lot of little things that achieve results. Thats a classic public health approach.

My take is that the optimal approach to food, for health and ethical reasons, may be vegetarianism.