Quotes by Nicholas Kristof

I took a gap year myself after high school and worked on a farm near Lyon, France. I stayed with the Vallet family, picked and packed fruit, and discovered that red wine can be a breakfast drink. That led to further travel as a university student.

Saudi Arabia isnt the enemy, but it is a problem. It could make so much positive difference in the Islamic world if it used its status to soothe Sunni-Shiite tensions and encourage tolerance. For a time, under King Abdullah, it seemed that the country was trying to reform, but now under King Salman, it has stalled.

The Golden Temple, Sikhisms holiest shrine, is in northwestern India near the Pakistani border, and it is a delightful place to contemplate the draw of faith.

My father, a refugee from Eastern Europe, was preparing a fraudulent marriage to an American citizen as a route to this country when he was sponsored, making fraud unnecessary. My wifes grandfather bought papers from another Chinese villager to be able to come to the United States.

During the Arab Spring, I learned all sorts of things from Twitter. I wouldnt necessarily trust that information, but it gave me ideas about questions to ask. You can really learn things from the wisdom of crowds.

The best escalator to opportunity in America is education.

A basic element of the American dream is equal access to education as the lubricant of social and economic mobility.

One of the aims of higher education is to broaden perspectives, and what better way than by a home stay in a really different country, like Bangladesh or Senegal? Time abroad also leaves one more aware of the complex prism of suspicion through which the United States is often viewed.

Girls education is no silver bullet. Iran and Saudi Arabia have both educated girls but refused to empower them, so both remain mired in the past. But when a country educates and unleashes women, those educated women often become force multipliers for good.

Why are fanatics so terrified of girls education? Because theres no force more powerful to transform a society. The greatest threat to extremism isnt drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.

Maybe our best family trip started at Victoria Falls, which drenches you with spray and is so vast that it makes Niagara Falls seem like a backyard creek. Then we rented a car and made our way to Hwange National Park, which was empty of people but crowded with zebras, giraffes, elephants and more.