Nicholas Kristof Quotes

I don’t understand you. China is a large empire—the largest nation in the world—and Tibet is so small. Why should you care what is happening there? It’s irrational.

What we saw in Tiananmen Square 31 years ago was a massacre, a massacre of innocent people that came from Hong Kong but also Chinese people to protest.

[They let] friendship with the leaders in China obscure our devotion to freedom and democracy when those kids set up in Tiananmen Square, and I think it was wrong.

Russia and China are very natural partners. We are neighbors with an immense common border.

I was fourteen when Kissinger made his secret trip to China, and then there was subsequently Nixon's trip to China, and I was very much seized with an interest in China.

In the spring and summer of 1989, a serious political disturbance took place in China.

Japan and China are isolated and without intercourse with other countries; hence the President directed me to attend to or watch the state of affairs in China also.

When he brought it to me four years ago, Rodney King had just arrived, I was involved in the clean-up of L.A. and I guess it was part of my experience.

If you want to treat China as an enemy, you have a much better chance of making them an enemy than if you treat them as a potential friend.

China has no desire to replace Western imperialism in Asia with an Oriental imperialism or isolationism of its own or anyone else.

Tiananmen Square in early 1989 attracted many dreamers like Ma Jian, who returned from Hong Kong to a one-room shack in Beijing in order to join the student protests.

In 1989, I was on Tiananmen Square with the students, living in their makeshift tents and joining their jubilant singing of the Internationale. In the two decades since, each time that I have gone back, visions from those days seem to return with increasing persistence.

In 1989, a lone and still-anonymous Chinese student stood unarmed in front of a Chinese tank and gave the world an enduring image of the determination of China's young to change their nation. He didn't text message the tank or share a video on YouTube.

When I hear people flatteringly say, 'You're an expert on East Asia...' I'm certainly an observer of East Asia, and central Asia, and ASEAN, and to a lesser extent South Asia and the Gulf, but there's always something behind the wall in China.

The biggest novelty of 2013 will be new leadership in China. Very little is known about the views of the new leaders - who will rule the country for ten years. But we do know they're the first generation of Chinese leaders who have spent the majority of their lives in a China 'opening up' to the rest of the world.

I was fourteen years old when I went to my first suffrage meeting. Returning from school one day, I met my mother just setting out for the meeting, and I begged her to let me go along.

Where in the world would I rather be than on the front line of history?

The threat to Russia isn't liberal Europe or America. It is nonliberal Islam and nonliberal China. Russia has to change. It can't be otherwise. It will take time. You have to be patient.

Clearly, the Chinese know that we want a good relationship with them.

The reason was the failure of both Japan and China to understand each other and the inability of America and the European powers to sympathize, without prejudice, with the peoples of East Asia.

China has become a major presence for most countries around the world but notably for its neighboring countries in Asia. So I think it is a common position for Japan and its Asian neighbors that we certainly would strive to maintain as much as possible friendly relations with China.

The goal of Australian foreign policy should be to promote the maximum harmony between the U.S. and China.

Now the British are coming. I think Cameron should ask the Chinese government not to make people 'disappear' or to jail them merely because they have different opinions.

Unrest has its reasons.

The only things that matter in the world are Japan and China, Russia and Europe. Latin America doesn’t matter…. And … there’s nothing you can do about the Middle East.