Famine Quotes - Page 11

• There has also been a change - a slippage - in our intellectual and moral strength. Seven lean years of drouth and famine have withered a field of ideas.

  John F. Kennedy

  Years, Ideas, Intellectual

  Address of Senator John F. Kennedy accepting the Democratic Party Nomination for the Presidency of the United States at Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, California, www.jfklibrary.org. July 15, 1960.

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• Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race. Confucius cares not for the poverty, squalor and misery of the people of China. Buddha remains undisturbed in his philosophical indifference to the famine and starvation of outraged Hindoos; Jahve continues deaf to the bitter cry of Israel; while Jesus refuses to rise from the dead against his Christians who are butchering each other.

  Emma Goldman

  Christian, Jesus, Philosophical

  Emma Goldman (1915). “Mother Earth, a Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Social Science and Literature”

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• We believe that the Greeks have been punished through [the Crusades] by the just judgement of God: these Greeks who have striven to rend the Seamless Robe of Jesus Christ ... Those who would not join Noah in his ark perished justly in the deluge; and these have justly suffered famine and hunger who would not receive as their shepherd the blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles.

  Pope Innocent III

  Jesus, Believe, Blessed

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• If the sky stands still, if the earth quakes, if there is famine, if there is pestilence, at once the cry is raised: Throw the Christians to the lions! So many to one?

  Tertullian

  Christian, Sky, Earth

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• Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine, and death, are never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience. Prodigies,omens, oracles, judgments, quite obscure the few natural events, that are intermingled with them. But as the former grow thinner every pagewe soon learn, that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated.

  David Hume

  Battle, Oracles, May

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• The people suffer from famine because of the multitude of taxes consumed by their superiors. It is through this that they suffer famine.

  Laozi

  People, Suffering, Taxes

  Colin Bradshaw-Jones, Laozi, Lao Tzu (2006). “The Tao Te Ching, Eighty-one Maxims from the Father of Taoism”, p.100, Lulu.com

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• Out of the chill and the shadow, into the thrill and the shine. Out of the dearth and the famine, into the fulness divine.

  Margaret Elizabeth Sangster

  Death, Shining, Shadow

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• Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savagestands on the unelastic plank of famine.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Civilization, Vaults, Economics

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.21, Cosimo, Inc.

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• A prison! heav'ns, I loath the hated name,
  Famine's metropolis, the sink of shame,
  A nauseous sepulchre, whose craving womb
  Hourly inters poor mortals in its tomb;
  By ev'ry plague and ev'ry ill possess'd,
  Ev'n purgatory itself to thee 's a jest.

  Tom Brown, Jr.

  Names, Prison, Shame

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• We legislate against forestalling and monopoly; we would have a common granary for the poor; but the selfishness which hoards thecorn for high prices, is the preventative of famine; and the law of self-preservation is surer policy than any legislation can be.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Self, Law, Common

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1848). “Essays, Orations and Lectures”

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• One must take draconian measures of demographic reduction against the will of the populations. Reducing the birth rate has proved to be impossible or insufficient. One must therefore increase the mortality rate. How? By natural means. Famine and sickness

  Robert McNamara

  Mean, Birth Rate, Population

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• Religion is based on the insistence that over and above all is a purpose and a guiding hand that is beneficent and kind, and would not leave a hair unnumbered or let a sparrow fall unnoticed to the ground. Those who cherish such hallucinations forget that the all-loving power is inflicting tuberculosis, cancer, famine, and pestilence on the trusting, simple sons of men.

  Clarence Darrow

  God, Religious, Cancer

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• Before the famine, which was in the 1840s, that was an emotional turning point... There are various documents showing how the Elizabethan English, in particular, were shocked by Irish displays of affection, by the way women acted toward strangers, walking up and putting their arms around them and kissing them right full on the mouth.

  Frank McCourt

  Kissing, Emotional, Mouths

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• The essence of war is fire, famine, and pestilence. They contribute to its outbreak; they are among its weapons; they become its consequences.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  War, Fire, Essence

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• By an increase in anger, warfare arises. By an increase of greed, famine arises. By an increase of stupidity, pestilence arises. Because these three calamities occur, the people's earthly desires grow all the more intense, and their false views thrive and multiply.

  Nichiren

  Views, People, Stupidity

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• After The Bomb we developed a fairly good system for moving food around and have avoided the kind of massive famines that attract the media. Although of course we've had a fair number of them, particularly in Africa, since The Bomb was written. But we have had a steady level of attrition of malnutrition and malnutrition-related disease. Probably something on the order of 5 to 10 million people starve to death each year, but they're spread out; they're not dramatic news events.

  Paul R. Ehrlich

  Moving, Media, Order

  Interview with Jesse Finfrock, www.motherjones.com. 2008.

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• Americans are wonderfully courteous to strangers, yet indiscriminately shoot kids in schools. They believe they are masters of the world, yet know nothing about what goes on outside their shores. They are people who believe the world stretches from California to Boston and everything outside is the bit they have to bomb to keep the price of oil down. Only one in five Americans hold a passport and the only foreign stories that make their news are floods, famine, and wars, because it makes them feel good to be an American. Feeling good to be American is what they live for.

  Brian Reade

  War, Believe, School

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• There have been poverty, pestilence, and famine, which were due to man's inadequate mastery of nature. There have been wars, oppressions and tortures which have been due to men's hostility to their fellow men.

  Bertrand Russell

  War, Men, Mastery

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Bertrand Russell's Best”, p.81, Routledge

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• Death Grinn'd horrible a ghastly smile, to hear His famine should be fill'd.

  John Milton

  Should, Horrible, Ghastly

  John Milton, Henry John Todd (1852). “The Poetical Works of John Milton: With Notes of Various Authors; and with Some Account of the Life and Writings of Milton, Derived Principally from Original Documents in Her Majesty's State-paper Office”, p.509

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• The ravages of drink are greater than those of war pestilence and famine combined.

  William E. Gladstone

  War, Pestilence, Drink

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• With enough money and international coordination, we can push incoming asteroids out of Earth's path. We might even be able to bring back extinct animals in the lab. The problem really isn't scientific - it's cultural. We aren't yet able to coordinate ourselves as a global civilization to do something simple like bring food to a famine-stricken region. We can actually use current satellite technologies to predict where famine will strike next, but we can't get food there - usually for political reasons.

  Annalee Newitz

  Technology, Simple, Animal

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If you stay in the mainstream of life, in other words, you let in the suffering of the world that invariably enters all of our lives by the time we're in our middle years, when we've experienced a few deaths and read a few headlines. Famine, poverty, abuse, you can't keep that all blocked out. If you let those things teach you, influence you, change you, those are the events that transition you without you even knowing it to become more compassionate. In other words, you hold onto your values, but you do it much more inclusively, humbly and in an open ended way. Suffering takes you there.

  Richard Rohr

  Years, Knowing, Abuse

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

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• Famine and unemployment are the raw material for dictatorships.

  Alexis Tsipras

  Raw Materials, Unemployment, Dictatorship

  Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece in Joint Press Conference, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. November 15, 2016.

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• Truth usually makes no sense. If your desire is for everything to make perfect sense, then you should take refuge in fiction. In fiction, all threads tie together in a neat bow and everything moves smoothly from one point to the next to the next. In real life, though... nothing makes sense. Bad things happen to good people. The pious die young while the wicked live until old age. War, famine, pestilence, death all occur randomly and senselessly and leave us more often than not scratching our heads and hurling the question 'why?' into a void that provides no answers.

  Peter David

  Real, War, Moving

  Peter David (2008). “Tigerheart”, p.85, Del Rey

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• I cannot understand antiabortion arguments that center on the sanctity of life. As a species, we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain, and lifelong, grinding poverty show us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’ve made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.

  Caitlin Moran

  Pain, War, Believe

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