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Hunger
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“When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it ... and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied ... and it is all one. ”
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“No man can be wise on an empty stomach.”
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“His hunger was a pungent sauce which made possible a very fair play of knife and fork ... ”
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“Hunger, like conscience, is a stern monitor, and mostly tells us unpleasant truths.”
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“... the first freedom of man, I contend, is the freedom to eat.”
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“What we apparently have failed to grasp is that, in this new world in which we live, the collective hunger of great masses of people, wherever they may be, will affect our long-range welfare, just as though they were our own people.”
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“Not that hunger does a cook justice. 'I do not like people that are hungry,' says Ude; 'hungry people eat any thing: I would have my dishes create, of themselves, an appetite; I do not wish them to be wanted till they are tasted, and then to eat is a compliment.'”
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“Where hunger is imposed by external circumstances, the act of starvation remains literal, a tragic biological event that does not serve metaphoric or symbolic purposes. It is only in a country where one is able to choose hunger that elective starvation may come to express cultural conflict or even social protest.”
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“For those who are not hungry, it is easy to palaver about the degradation of charity ...”
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“Hunger makes a thief of any man.”
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“... starvation is a shame and disgrace to the world and totally unnecessary in modern times.”
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“A starving man can't see right or wrong. He just sees food.”
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“There will not cease to be ferment in the world unless people are sure of their food.”
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“The decision to feed the world / is the real decision.”
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“In much of the world the chief human right that people recognize is 800 calories a day.”
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“In these days when we feed those who are not hungry, we are stealing from those who are starving, even though the food is our own.”
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“Weary men, what reap ye? — Gold corn for the stranger. / What sow ye? — Human corpses that wait for the avenger. / Fainting forms, hunger stricken, what see ye in the offing? / Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger's scoffing. / There's a proud array of soldiers — what do they round your door? / They guard our master's granaries from the thin hands of the poor. / Pale mothers, wherefore weeping? Would to God that we were dead — / Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread.”
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“People are not hungry just for bread, they are hungry for love.”
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“Hunger, like cold feet, is hard to go to sleep on.”
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“Something besides charity is needed in order to provide bread for everyone.”
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“If we mammals don't get something to eat every day or two, our temperature drops, all our signs fall off, and we begin to starve. Living at biological red alert, it's not surprising how obsessed we are with food; I'm just amazed we don't pace and fret about it all the time.”
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“What good is school when you're hungry?”
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“... a hungry man is an angry one.”
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“People don't speak of hunger when they know what it is to be hungry.”
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“A man with money to pay for a meal can talk about hunger without demeaning himself. ... But for a man with no money hunger is a disgrace.”
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“Only people who are assured of daily food can concern themselves with matters of principle and ethic. A man will become a slave rather than starve.”
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“Who has gone hungry learns to think of the future and of the children.”
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“babies ain't cute / hungry.”
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“... alas, who can be sentimental and hungry!”
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“As a nation, we take great pride in rushing in to rescue people all over the world after natural disasters or horrific despotic regimes. ... Why is there so little compassion for our own hungry children? Why is a child who goes to school hungry and tired supposed to become superhuman and do amazing things in life? When did we become a nation that turns on its own and looks with suspicion on anyone who needs help? Read the words at the base of the Statue of Liberty again and remember what we once stood for.”
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“The rice bowl is to me the most valid reason in the world for doing anything. A piece of one's soul to the multitudes in return for rice and wine does not seem to me a sacrilege.”
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“Work went on monotonously, and our constant hunger was wrenching: rice powder and bran, which I sometimes roasted in an attempt to give it some flavor, had torn my insides to shreds. One morning I didn't have the strength to get up, and no one came to see what had happened to me. Everyone was so used to having people just disappear.”
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“To be bound by hungers is a beautiful thing but to be bound by physical hungers only is too low a state for man.”
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“Satisfaction, even after one has dined well, is not so interesting and eager a feeling as hunger.”
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“Hungry people cannot be good at learning or producing anything, except perhaps violence.”
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“I have two enemies in all the world, / Two twins, inseparably pooled: / The hunger of the hungry and the fullness of the full.”
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“... there's times when somethin' steamin' does your heart as much good as it does your stummick, which, the two o' them bein' such near neighbors, no wonder we get 'em mixed up sometimes, an' think the one is starved when it's only the other.”
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“So as not to transgress against your commandment, so lovingly issued, for a full account of our health, I tell you that I am following the doctor's orders by not observing Lent, and that, being already mostly toothless at my age [27], I will be very pleased if you can send me some fatty mutton, for surely I can manage to eat that.”
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“Those boys could hear a meat bone being dropped into soup half a mile away. If a man brushed a crumb from his beard, there was their knock on his door ...”
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“When we are not physically starving, we have the luxury to realize psychic and emotional starvation.”
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“... the hunger gnawed up and down her great body like a rat and would not let her sleep.”
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“The unequal distribution of food is one of the world's most tragic facts. Millions of people die because they have too little to eat, and many die because they have too much.”
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“No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. ... For sixty years, ever since I came back from the camp, I have been eating against starvation.”
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“What can be said about chronic hunger. Perhaps that there's a hunger that can make you sick with hunger. That it comes in addition to the hunger you already feel. That there is a hunger which is always new, which grows insatiably, which pounces on the never-ending old hunger that already took such effort to tame. How can you face the world if all you can say about yourself is that you're hungry.”
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“Some of the best conversations that I have ever heard have been all about food, and there is a special warmth and intimacy about books in which the details of eating and drinking are described with a proper regard for their importance. Hunger, and the satisfaction of hunger, are almost the least common denominator of human living ...”
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“Hunger steals the memory.”
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“Hunger also changes the world — when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.”
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“A child is a child in any country, whatever the politics. Let's get down to basics. That's what a child forces you to do. Nothing else much matters, there is no complicated diplomacy, when a child is starving. It's simple. And we'd better do something about it. For our sakes, too. That is, if we want to continue to call ourselves human.”
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“I will not rest until no child goes hungry. All is possible.”
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“[On including both blacks and whites in her Freedom Farm Cooperative:] Hunger has no color line.”
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“[On her Freedom Farm Cooperative:] If you give a hungry man food, he will eat it. [But] if you give him land, he will grow his own food.”
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“... they were hungry enough to eat a sawmill and it a-running.”