Starvation Quotes

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

“Desire is the kind of thing that
eats you
and
leaves you starving.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“Feel what it's like to truly starve, and I guarantee that you'll forever think twice before wasting food.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“It has to be admitted that starving nations never seem to be quite so starving that they cannot afford to have far more expensive armaments than anybody else.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she’d thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be. (130)”
― Ron Rash, Serena

“That bowl of soup—it was dearer than freedom, dearer than life itself, past, present, and future.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

“The challenge of abating one with a genuine ego problem is to not try to put him down. Any and all antagonization, in his mind, is merely compensated for by his own descriptions: his feelings of persecution by the envious and his ideals of worth. Arguably, the genuine ego is more of a circumstantial defense mechanism rather than a steady arrogance in need of starvation.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture.”
― Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics

“The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...”
― Ramez Naam, Crux

“Some days it’s fine. Others it nearly breaks me. The emptiness of the horizon, and the hunger in my body, and how will we ever survive this if we can’t survive each other?”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“Tipsy, they tumbled early into bed - to get as much sleep as they could. So they would feel less hunger. The summer catch had been poor; there wasn't much food. They ate with care and looked sideways at the old: the old were gluttons, everybody knew it, and what was the good of feeding them? It wouldn't harm them to starve a little.
The hungry dogs howled. The women rinsed the children's bellies with hot water three times a day, so they wouldn't cry so much for food. The old starved silently. ( "The North" )”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories

“I died last night. Seventy years too young.”
― Colin Thompson

“North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read thePyongyang Timesthrough the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as 'duck.' One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy—they wouldn't tell me the breed—but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the realization that I hadn't seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“An empty stomach will teach you lessons a full stomach can’t.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“You give a whole lot of respect to food when you know what hunger is capable of.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“Food is not everything, they say, but it means the world to a starving person.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“When you have been a victim of constant hunger, you learn how to stop wasting food.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“A Donkey having heard some Grasshoppers chirping, was highly enchanted; and, desiring to possess the same charms of melody, demanded what sort of food they lived on to give them such beautiful voices. They replied, “The dew.” The Donkey resolved that he would live only upon dew, and in a short time died of hunger.”
― Aesop

“While the poor devours food, the rich toys with it.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“The rich hear about starvation.
The poor can write a novel about it.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“Fasting is natural, in wintertime most animals do it through hibernation.”
― Steven Magee

“I did not ask
for the horrible past
they gave me.
I won’t let them
mingle with my dreams.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“The masses do not realize that the global food system is going to collapse in the coming decades due to climate change and malnutrition will be the new pandemic!”
― Steven Magee

“The shortest method to keep people away from Justice and Truth is to starve them. When individuals agree to do whatever to fill their stomachs, there will be little left of human ideals. Dungeons, Chains, Whistleblowers and sticks in the hands of Cowards come into play to starve them, not to let them even have a loaf of bread.”
― Jeyhun Aliyev Silo, To Be Tried As A Jew

“Some mornings we wake, our stomachs empty, our stomachs angry, but never do we look to the ground beneath our feet with longing in our mouths. We chew on our pride. The dirt we do not eat.”
― Roxane Gay, Ayiti

“The best lessons are learned through starvation.”
― Sharky Rich

“Hunger should not make you eat whatever you are offered or given, it should help you see and understand what is unfit for your body.”
― Eduvie Donald

“Before Covid most people may have been aware that our politicians are not our friends, but Covid taught us that politicians are not only our enemies, but they are also actively trying to enslave us and kill us.”
― Jack Freestone

“Mothers as brave as lionesses, poor Belcourt children, little Kabyles starving to death in 1939 – those people also earned the applause.”
― Sima Samar, Outspoken: My Fight for Freedom and Human Rights in Afghanistan