Nicholas D. Kristof · 294 pages
Rating: (43.6K votes)
“More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century. More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.
The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor each day... life time risk of maternal death is 1,000x higher in a poor country than in the west. That should be an international scandal.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“It's no accident that the countries that have enjoyed an economic take off have been those that educated girls and then gave them the autonomy to move to the cities to find work”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“Our focus has to be on changing reality, not changing laws.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back into the water. “What are you doing, son?” the man asks. “You see how many starfish there are? You’ll never make a difference.” The boy paused thoughtfully, and picked up another starfish and threw it into the ocean. “It sure made a difference to that one,” he said.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“Decades from now, people will look back and wonder how societies could have acquiesced in a sex slave trade in the twenty-first century that is... bigger than the transatlantic slave trade was in the nineteenth. They will be perplexed that we shrugged as a lack of investment in maternal health caused half a million women to perish in childbirth each year.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“Women aren't the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“One of the great failings of the American education system (in our view) is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“The tide of history is turning women from beasts of burden and sexual playthings into full-fledged human beings.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“Americans of faith should try as hard to save the lives of African women as the lives of unborn fetuses.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“...when women gain control over spending, less family money is devoted to instant gratification and more for education and starting small businesses.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“When India feels that the West cares as much about slavery as it does about pirated DVDs, it will dispatch people to the borders to stop traffickers.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“So let us be clear about this up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women's power as economic catalysts. That is the process under way - not a drama of victimization but of empowerment, the kind that transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen.
This is a story of transformation. It is change that is already taking place, and change that can accelerate if you'll just open your heart and join in.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“The tools to crush modern slavery exist, but the political will is lacking.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“You educate a boy, and you're educating an individual. You educate a girl, and you're educating a village.
-African Proverb”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine “gendercide” in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“The equivalent of five jumbo jets' worth of women die in labor each day, but the issue is almost never covered.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. —MARK TWAIN”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“When women gain a voice in society, there's evidence of less violence.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“sexism and misogyny. How else to explain why so many more witches were burned than wizards?”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“Women's empowerment helps raise economic productivity and reduce infant mortality. It contributes to improved health and nutrition. It increases the chances of education for the next generation.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“When the history of African development is written, it will be clear that a turning point involved the empowerment of women.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine “gendercide” in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century. In”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“...cultural barriers can be overcome relatively swiftly where there is the political will to do so.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“Women might just have something to contribute to civilization other than their vaginas. —CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY, Florence of Arabia”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“In general, the best clue to a nation's growth and development potential is the status and role of women. This is the greatest handicap of Muslim Middle Eastern societies today, the flaw that most bars them from modernity”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“One of the great failings of the American education system, in our view, is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad. Study-abroad programs tend to consist of herds of students visiting Oxford or Florence or Paris. We believe that universities should make it a requirement that all graduates spend at least some time in the developing world, either by taking a "gap year" or by studying abroad. If more Americans worked for a summer teaching English at a school like Mukhtar's in Pakistan, or working at a hospital like HEAL Africa in Congo, our entire society would have a richer understanding of the world around us. And the rest of the world might also hold a more positive view of Americans.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
Nicholas D. Kristof
Born place: in Chicago, IL, The United States
See more on GoodReads
“a myth is the matrix that is transformed from culture to culture, but basically remains essentially the same.”
― Kenneth Atchity, quote from The Messiah Matrix
“We will never stand in awe of being loved by God until we reckon with the seriousness of our sin and the justice of his wrath against us. But when, by grace, we waken to our unworthiness, then we may look at the suffering and death of Christ and say, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the [wrath-absorbing] propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).”
― John Piper, quote from The Passion of Jesus Christ
“The crucial question, therefore, is not how to accomplish the final reconciliation. That messianic problem ought not to be taken out of God's hands. The only thing worse than the failure of some modern grand narratives of emancipation would have been their success! Merely by trying to accomplish the messianic task, the have already done too much of the work of the antichrist. In demasking anti-messianic projects that offer universal salvation, Lyotard helps us ask the right kind of question, which is not how to achieve the final reconciliation, but what resources we need to live in peace in the absence of the final reconciliation.”
― Miroslav Volf, quote from Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation
“Either you trust a man and give him authority to carry out his treatment or you do not. When it goes well you are happy that you did so. When it goes ill you think, if only . . .”
― Winston Graham, quote from The Four Swans
“What would happen if you set me free?”
“I can’t,” he said, shaking his head. “Even if I had the key to those chains and let you go, Nero would beat the snot out of me.”
“Scratch that idea.”
He lifted his chin and disguised an emotion I couldn’t read. “You mean it?”
“No one takes a beating for me.”
For the first time, Finn was silent.
His jeans rustled as he stood up to leave. When he was out of sight, I heard him mumble to himself, “I wish I could give you a blanket.”
I loved that kid immediately.”
― Dannika Dark, quote from Twist
When God Writes Your...
The Last Enchantment
The Collected Poems
The Living Dead
Everyone Loves a Her...
Teaching a Stone to...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
