Famine Quotes

• This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.

  Barack Obama

  Children, Ocean, Future

  Address to the People of Berlin, delivered 24 July 2008, Victory Column

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• A time of famine and poverty will come and the people as a whole as well as every individual in it will suffer.

  Nikolai Gogol

  People, Suffering, Poverty

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• You can't brace yourself for famine if you've never known hunger.

  David Sedaris

  Hunger, Braces, Known

  David Sedaris (2009). “Naked”, p.191, Hachette UK

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• The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.

  Charles Trevelyan

  Selfish, Real, Character

  "Writing the Frontier: Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland". Book by John McCourt, March 19, 2015.

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• They that die by famine die by inches.

  Matthew Henry

  Hunger, Inches, Dies

  An Exposition on the Old and New Testament Psalm 59 (1710)

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• Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.

  Margaret Atwood

  Real, Mind, Different

  Margaret Atwood (2010). “Murder in the Dark”, p.52, New Canadian Library

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• I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Country, Teaching, People

  "Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the World’s Poorest Citizens, Makes His Case". Interview with Linda O’Bryon, knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu. March 9, 2005.

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• Unbelief starves the soul; faith finds food in famine.

  Richard Cecil

  Soul, Unbelief

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• A person who steals bread during a famine is not treated as a thief.

  Cat Stevens

  Thieves, Bread, Stealing

  "Faith and the future" by Yusuf Islam, www.theguardian.com. September 18, 2001.

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• This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet.

  Barack Obama

  Teamwork, Together, Action

  Address to the People of Berlin, delivered 24 July 2008, Victory Column

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• I knew the poor,
  I knew the hideous death they die,
  when famine lays its bleak hand on the door;
  I knew the rich,
  sated with merriment,
  who yet are sad.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Life, Knowledge, Doors

  Hilda Doolittle (1988). “Selected Poems”, p.120, New Directions Publishing

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• Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Rain, Adversity

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt McLaughlin (2010). “The Laws of Nature: Excerpts from the Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.14, North Atlantic Books

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• The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace.

  Norman Borlaug

  People, Population, World

  "The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity". Norman Borlaug's Nobel lecture in the auditorium of the Nobel Institute, www.nobelprize.org. December 11, 1970.

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• Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past.

  Norman Borlaug

  Regret, Past, Men

  Norman Ernest Borlaug (1971). “Mankind and Civilization at Another Crossroad”

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• Famine was quite deliberately employed as an instrument of national policy, as the last means of breaking the resistance of the peasantry to the new system where they are divorced from personal ownership of the land and obligated to work on the conditions which the state may demand from them... This famine may fairly be called political because it was not the result of any overwhelming natural catastrophe or such complete exhaustions of the country's resources in foreign and civil wars.

  William Henry Chamberlin

  Country, War, Mean

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• What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.

  Florence Nightingale

  Selfish, War, Nursing

  Florence Nightingale (2001). “The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale”

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• Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  War, Issues, Population

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• There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.

  T. S. Eliot

  Death, Eye, Hands

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• Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.

  Eric Temple Bell

  Imagination, Mind, Shadow

  Eric Temple Bell (1930). “Debunking Science”

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• Every one knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there was always a war, and generally a famine somewhere.

  Mark Twain

  War, Hard

  Mark Twain, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays”, p.1279, GENERAL PRESS

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• The least-bad scenario is a hard landing, global recession worse than the 1930s. The worst-case borrows from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence and death.

  Kenneth S. Deffeyes

  War, Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, Pestilence

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• I wish I could view the belly that oozes over the top of my pants as a badge of maternal honor. I do try. I make sure that the women whose looks I admire all have sufficient fat reserves to survive a famine, and I make a lot of snide comments about the skeletal likes of Lara Flynn Boyle and Paris Hilton.

  Ayelet Waldman

  Views, Paris, Honor

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• But however secure and well-regulated civilized life may become, bacteria, Protozoa, viruses, infected fleas, lice, ticks, mosquitoes, and bedbugs will always lurk in the shadows ready to pounce when neglect, poverty, famine, or war lets down the defenses.

  Hans Zinsser

  War, Civilization, Shadow

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• From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows.

  Charles Darwin

  Nature, War, Animal

  On the Origin of Species ch. 14 (1859)

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• I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.

  Winston Churchill

  Hate, People, Beastly

  Winston S. Churchill (2013). “Churchill By Himself”, p.328, RosettaBooks

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