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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• No substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic country - no matter how poor.

  Amartya Sen

  Country, Independent, Democratic

  "Development as Freedom". Book by Amartya Sen, 1999.

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• People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.

  Banksy

  Art, Morning, War

  Banksy (2005). “Banksy: wall and piece”, Random House UK

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• ...Have the stresses of war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of Collective Farms?

  Winston Churchill

  War, Stress, Ukraine

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• Governments of rich countries spend some $6bn of tax money a year on disaster relief and development aid overseas, while each new earthquake, famine or tidal wave can attract 1,000 aid organisations, from the United Nations Children's Fund and Oxfam to the 'Jesus Brigades' of the American south and other charitable adventurers.

  James Buchan

  Country, Jesus, Children

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• For those dependent on their gardens for fresh food, it was often a case of feast or famine... (One settler wrote), "Strawberries were now so plentiful that... I made 287 lbs of jam..."

  Bee Dawson

  Garden, Jam, Made

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• Just try to make the world a better place for your having been here.

  Jimmy Doolittle

  Extraordinary Person, Trying, World

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• Statistics has been the handmaid of science, and has poured a flood of light upon the dark questions of famine and pestilence, ignorance and crime, disease and death.

  James A. Garfield

  Ignorance, Dark, Light

  Garfield, James A. (1882). “The works of James Abram Garfield. (2 Volumes) Volume 1”, p.453, Best Books on

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• Americans are blessed with great plenty; we are a generous people and we have a moral obligation to assist those who are suffering from poverty, disease, war and famine.

  Adam Schiff

  War, Blessed, Compassion

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