Quotables

These come from yesterday's New York Times:

"A girl is just not as good as a son. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you don’t have a son, you are not as good as other people who have one."
--Su Qingcai, a tea farmer in China who paid $3,500 for a five-year-old boy.

The best way to elevate women, by far, is to educate girls and to give them opportunities to earn income through micro-loans, factory jobs or vocational training. It is sometimes said that the best contraceptive isn’t the pill or the IUD, but education for girls. --Nicholas Kristof in "Pregnant (Again) and Poor"