Nicholas Kristof Quotes

I am profoundly disturbed by any attempt to take government responsibility away from government … it is government’s responsibility to educate all of our children …. The fundamental responsibility for poverty of this country does not belong to the churches; it belongs to the government.

We think there are better solutions to fighting poverty because we see what the War on Poverty has produced. It produced tens of trillions of dollars in spending. It has been a 51-year exercise, and yet the poverty rates in America today are not much better than when we started the War on Poverty.

If we do not pay for children in good schools, then we are going to pay for them in prisons and mental hospitals.

The cure for crime is not the electric chair, but the high chair.

It's more important to try to do something for the crores of poor people of my country.

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

I got a way to get through to kids. I try to take that and use that to my advantage. If we work on the kids right now, I'm telling you, they'll be making less mistakes, the jails will be gettin' less full. It's all about what we do with the kids.

Before playing football, I didn't fit in anywhere. My parents didn't have a lot of money, which they spent on our education to send us to Catholic private school in Oakland, mostly black. The other kids had more money than I did. I started school early; I was young. So I'd come back to my hood and read.

Eradicate poverty. This is all that matters in my country. When I am out training I think about this a lot; when I am running it is going over in my mind. As a country we cannot move forward until we eradicate poverty.

Our society spends a lot of money on prison bars. For the sake of our kids, let's invest in monkey bars.

You can spend the money on new housing for poor people and the homeless, or you can spend it on a football stadium or a golf course.

When the students are occupied, they're not juvenile delinquents. I believe that education is a capital investment.

We've got to take care of the poor.

A large part of crime is economics - if people are working and and have a home and family to support, then I believe you can reduce the crime rate.

We all ran barefooted on the dusty roads in our past, but now the Emperor wears shoes, and it is our responsibility to ensure that the barefooted child and the doting mother are afforded a holistic environment to realise their dreams and ambitions.

I want to fight poverty and ignorance and give opportunity to those people who are locked out.

Society during the last hundred years has been alternately perplexed and encouraged respecting the two great questions: how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship?

She may hide it, but Clinton is a policy nerd. Ask about microfinance, and she'll talk your ear off. Mention early childhood interventions, and she will gush about obscure details of a home visitation experiment in Elmira, N.Y., that dramatically improved child outcomes.

Giving a poor person money keeps them poor.

The only way we are going to ameliorate pressing social needs is through public intervention.

An important lever for sustained action in tackling poverty and reducing hunger is money.

It isn't the rich people's fault that poor people are poor. Poor people who get an education and work hard in this country will stop being poor. That should be the goal for all poor people everywhere.

Preventing poverty beats curing it.

Some people say that we will never fix education in America until we fix poverty. I think that they have it exactly wrong. We will never fix poverty until we fix education.

For every jail that Mr. Nixon would build, Mr. Humphrey would also build a house. For every policeman Mr. Wallace would hire, Mr. Humphrey would also hire a good teacher.