Nicholas Kristof Quotes

Social services, not wealth per se, seem to be the key to lower birth rates. The Chinese, although among the poorest peoples of the world, have brought their fertility rate down to 2.4, partly by social coercion, but mostly by broadly available education, health care and family planning.

When parents are confident that their children will live, they have fewer of them. They invest more in each child's food, health and education.

In order to stabilize human population growth, we must prioritize the education of girls, the empowerment of women, the provision of ubiquitous access to the knowledge and techniques of fertility management, and the continued raising of child survival rates.

Usually this desire for family size limitation has been laid to economic pressure... It has asserted itself among the rich and among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent. It has been manifested in such horrors as infanticide, child abandonment and abortion

I do not want to speak about overpopulation or birth control, but I think education is the way to give new impetus to the poverty question.

Targeting women is key in developing countries. It allows them to go to school, to say how many children they're going to have, which drives the issue of population and how their children will be educated. Women are the best investments in developing countries.

War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.

The good news is world population growth rate decreases systematically and is expected to reach zero by 2050, thanks to urbanisation and women's education.

Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more and and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion.

We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people.

Education of both men and women is a wonderful contraceptive.

You educate a boy, and he'll have fewer children, but it's a small effect. You educate a girl, and, on average, she will have a significantly smaller family.

I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise.

The poor are making themselves poorer through rising birth rates.

There is only one question to ask a presidential candidate that makes any sense. It is: What do you propose to do about the rate of illegitimate births?

Liberating women from repeated childbirth can liberate them from poverty as well.

When the wages of labour are hardly sufficient to maintain two children, a man marries and has five or six.

… the lack of access to basic family planning services and information undermines a woman’s ability to determine her own destiny. It also increases illness and mortality rates of women and their children, and inhibits the ability of families to climb out of poverty.

The comforts and well-being of the poor cannot be permanently secured without some regard on their part, or some effort on the part of the legislature, to regulate the increase of their numbers, and to render less frequent among them early and improvident marriages.

Family planning campaigns should be increased so that the sizes of families are manageable and enjoy the best possible standard of living.

Except for a few oil-rich countries, no developing country has successfully modernized without slowing population growth.

While the overall goal of any society must be to educate all its members, at this stage in human history the greatest need is to educate women and girls. For over twenty years, studies have consistently documented that, of all possible investments, educating women and girls pays the highest overall dividends in terms of social development, the eradication of poverty and the advancement of community.

Governments must act and private citizens cooperate urgently through voluntary means to secure this right [of birth control programs] for all people. Failure would limit the expectation of future generations to abject poverty and suffering and bring down upon us history's condemnation.

[Margaret] Sanger’s hope that the pill might lift women out of poverty and stop the world’s rapid population growth [was futile]. In fact, the pill has been far more popular and had greater impact among the affluent than the poor and has been far more widely used in developed countries than developing ones.

The problem of burgeoning population can be addressed if we begin with women itself. And, we need to educate them and spread awareness about birth control and family planning through TV channels and newspapers.