Famine Quotes - Page 8

• Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?

  George R. R. Martin

  Wise, Baby, Kings

  Interview with Mikal Gilmore, www.rollingstone.com. April 23, 2014.

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• A few years ago the Deists denied the inspiration of the Bible on account of its cruelty. At the same time they worshiped what they were pleased to call the God of Nature. Now we are convinced that Nature is as cruel as the Bible; so that, if the God of Nature did not write the Bible, this God at least has caused earthquakes and pestilence and famine, and this God has allowed millions of his children to destroy one another. So that now we have arrived at the question - not as to whether the Bible is inspired and not as to whether Jehovah is the real God, but whether there is a God or not.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Children, Real, Inspiration

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.2794, Library of Alexandria

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• Vnder water, famine; under snow, bread.

  George Herbert

  Snow, Water, Bread

  George Herbert (1959). “The works of George Herbert”

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• I read the other day an account of a meeting between John Knox and John Calvin. Imagine a dialogue between a pestilence and a famine!

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Atheism, Pestilence, Imagine

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.282, Library of Alexandria

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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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• We still live in a world of such gross injustice and inequality, that only privileged people like ourselves can afford to think of eros and art as top concerns in life. They are important, for sure, but I think it's high time to shift priorities around, away from selfish indulgence, and toward more concern for the wellbeing of so many others who suffer atrocities, injustice, and famine, all over the planet.

  Massimo Pigliucci

  Art, Selfish, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• We should take a lesson from the Irish potato famine: monocultures are vulnerable. Monocultures of any kind are very vulnerable, because one change and you're cooked. So we should be diversifying, wouldn't you say?

  Margaret Atwood

  Lessons, Potatoes, Kind

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• When you see someone dying in front of you from a direct and simple cause, it's easier to deal with [that] than famine or drought or a more indirect cause. It's overwhelming and frightening and kind of distant, but we do see it every day with plants and animals and species dying.

  John H Richardson

  Animal, Simple, Dying

  Source: www.mtv.com

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• During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model -- all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.

  Thomas Sowell

  Country, Europe, America

  Thomas Sowell (2011). “Dismantling America and Other Controversial Essays (Large Print 16pt)”, p.306, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• With war and famine and flood and special effects films, when you do somebody under duress, you have to be really be inventive and the risk of keeping it very simple is you might loose some of the audience because it's not overt, it's hidden, not coming at you. Then you might cut through to some of this numbness and reach something profound and tragic.

  Peter Weir

  War, Cutting, Simple

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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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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• 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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• 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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• We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves — and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it’s going to get worse and worse.

  David Attenborough

  Views, People, Support

  "David Attenborough - Humans are plague on Earth" by Louise Gray, www.telegraph.co.uk. January 22, 2013.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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