Ingrid > Ingrid's Quotes

“Those who take lightly promises they make to those they love are people who find little lasting satisfaction in life. This is not an easy time in which to live. That does not mean that it has to be a difficult time to love, but it does mean that you will find unusual stresses upon your lives and your relationship.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension

“Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“The death of Nighteyes gutted me. I walked wounded through my life in the days that followed, unaware of just how mutilated I was. I was like the man who complains of the itching of his severed leg. The itching distracts from the immense knowledge that one will forever after hobble through life.”
― Robin Hobb, Golden Fool

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“As a society, we denounce "delinquents," "hoodlums" and "hooligans," but the truth is that we routinely fail troubled kids before they fail us. More children die each year in the United States from abuse and neglect than from cancer. For every child who dies, thousands are injured, raped or brutally abused. We shrug as millions of children undergo trauma in ways that harm them and unravel our social fabric--and then we blame the kids when things go wrong.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“Astonishingly, the share of students who don't get education in contraceptives is going up, not down. The Trump administration even tried to cut off funding for a teen pregnancy prevention program (lawsuits forced it to continue that funding). What's confounding is that these same officials are often anti-abortion, yet they don't seem to understand that preventing unplanned pregnancies will reduce abortions. They believe that condoms will promote promiscuity, when condoms no more cause sex than umbrellas cause rain. These same officials then thunder about the irresponsibility of girls who get pregnant, oblivious to their own irresponsibility.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“The reason we have a single-payer health-care system for the elderly (Medicare) but not for children is simple: seniors vote, and children don’t. So while American children die at 55 percent higher rates than children in other advanced countries, Americans who make it to age sixty-five and qualify for Medicare then have a remaining life expectancy similar to that of our peer countries.”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“It’s perhaps telling that the United States for years was, embarrassingly, the only country in the world besides Somalia and South Sudan that had not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. That has now changed: the United States is the only nation that hasn’t bothered to ratify it.”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“of the 1 percent saw a bit less than a doubling of real incomes. Those in the 90th through 99th percentiles simply stayed even, with incomes growing at the same rate as per capita GDP, or gross domestic product. And the bottom 90 percent lost relative ground, with their incomes since 1980 growing more slowly than per capita GDP. The result is that the top 1 percent now owns twice as great a share of national wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent. We went from being a world leader in opportunity to being a laggard.”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“Life expectancy continues to rise in most of the rest of the industrialized world, but in the United States it has dropped for three years in a row—for the first time in a century. As we’ll see, American kids today are 55 percent more likely to die by the age of nineteen than children in the other rich countries that are members of the OECD, the club of industrialized nations. America now lags behind its peer countries in health care and high-school graduation rates while suffering greater violence, poverty and addiction. This dysfunction damages all Americans: it undermines our nation’s competitiveness, especially as growing economies like China’s are fueled by much larger populations and by rising education levels, and may erode the well-being of our society for decades to come. The losers are not just those at the bottom of society, but all of us. For America to be strong, we must strengthen all Americans.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“There are the subsidies to the wealthy like the carried-interest tax loophole or the mortgage subsidy for yachts. By some calculations, corporate subsidies, credits, and loopholes are 50% higher than entitlements to the poor, not including medicare and medicaid.Some of the other subsidies are outlandish. Put a few goats on your golf course and you can classify it as farmland, as President Trump did, and you can save large sums in taxes. The tax code has come to serve the wealthy in myriad of ways.”
― Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn

“The wealthy have also fought to underfund and defang the Internal Revenue Service, so it doesn’t have the resources to audit or fight dubious deductions. Only about 6 percent of tax returns of those with income of more than $1 million are audited, along with 0.7 percent of business tax returns. Meanwhile, there is one group that the IRS scrutinizes rigorously: the working poor with incomes below $20,000 a year who receive the Earned Income Tax Credit. More than one-third of all tax audits are focused on that group struggling to make ends meet, even as the agency cuts back on audits of the wealthy—while the top 5 percent of taxpayers account for more than half of all underreported income.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“Blacks routinely get the worst of it in the judicial process, particularly when they are poor...
The United States sentencing commission found that blacks get sentences 19% longer than whites do, for the same offense, even after controlling for criminal history and other variables. The darker an African-American's complexion, the longer the sentence, researchers found. Blacks are also more likely to be found guilty and be sentenced to death.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“One of the most infuriating elements of American myopia about investing in at-risk kids is that politicians often insist that they don't have the funds to pay for social services, but they somehow find the resources to pay for prisons later on. Republican lawmakers don't want to pay for $500 IUDs for low-income women, so they pay $17,000 for Medicaid births. They don't want to pay to reduce lead poisoning, even though that means paying for special education classes for years to come.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

“I watched a lot of people come to the end, and everyone around them kept begging them to fight. It takes real strength to keep on fight, and yes, usually that’s the right answer. Keep fighting, keep holding on, no matter what. But sometimes I think we forget that it also takes strength to be able to let go.”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure

“Being human is to grieve constantly.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends