Nicholas D. Kristof Quotes

You would see people going back to homes that had been burned, putting thatch over their structures again. They still couldn’t leave the area without the danger of men being killed or women being raped, but it was a start.

You will be judged in years to come by how you responded to genocide on your watch.

You don’t need to invade a place or install a new government to help bring about a positive change.

While Americans have heard of Darfur and think we should be doing more there, they aren’t actually angry at the president about inaction.

We all might ask ourselves why we tune in to these more trivial matters and tune out when it comes to Darfur.

There seems to be this sense among even well-meaning Americans that Africa is this black hole of murder and mutilation that can never be fixed, no matter what aid is brought in.

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.

There is an element of anger among women who’ve been raped. There’s certainly a major element of humiliation. But it really does seem like a medical condition of shock and horror.

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.

The world spends $40 billion a year on pet food.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The conflict in Darfur could escalate to where we’re seeing 100,000 victims per month.

The bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column.

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.

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female.