Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Nicholas D. Kristof

Quote by Nicholas D. Kristof

“The first step toward better policy is to amend our understanding of people's struggles so that it is less about individual irresponsibility and more about our collective irresponsibility in tolerating levels of child poverty that would be unacceptable in the rest of the developed world.”

Quote by Nicholas D. Kristof

Work

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Nicholas D. Kristof
Nicholas D. Kristof

Nicholas D. Kristof is an American journalist renowned for his in-depth investigative reporting. Born on April 27, 1959, he has won the Pulitzer Prize and has been a columnist for The New York Times. Kristof's reporting focuses on global poverty, human rights, and foreign policy issues, often sparking public attention to important social issues. more

You May Also Like

“[A]t least since the late nineteenth century when the primary role in categorising sexual behaviour and naming what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘perverse’ passed, in most industrial societies, from the religious to the medical and scientific professions, we have lived with the notion of distinct categories of people labelled ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’. (The category ‘homosexual’ was coined by the Viennese writer Karol Benkert in 1869, ‘heterosexual’ emerging somewhat later.) Since that time, new discourses have tried to establish the male ‘homosexual’ as a distinct type of person - as opposed to same-sex attraction or same-sex acts being seen as a potential in everyone. As Peter Tatchell [‘It’s Just a Phase: Why Homosexuality is Doomed’, in Simpson (ed.), Anti-Gay, London: Cassell. 1996] puts it, ‘prior to that time … there were only homosexual acts, not homosexual people … [For] the medieval Catholic Church … homosexuality was not … the special sin of a unique class of people but a dangerous temptation to which any mortal might succumb. This doctrine implicitly conceded the attractiveness of same-sex desire, and unwittingly acknowledged its pervasive, universal potential”