Norman Borlaug - Ken Loach - Spitting Image TV - The Book of Eli 2010 - The Lady From Shanghai 1948 - Gone With the Wind 1939 - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine TV - Ronald Reagan - George Foreman - Mary Robinson - William Shakespeare - John Steinbeck - Jo Brand - Nenia Campbell - Pranab Mukherjee - Barack Obama - Andrew Marr TV - Proverbs 25:21 - Ecclesiasticus 18:25 - Pearl S Buck - George Orwell - A A Milne - Beaumont and Fletcher - George Eliot - Ernest Hemingway - Down and Out in America TV - Bobby Sands: 66 Days TV - Hannah Fry: Size Matters TV - Wolvoman80 - Covid 19: World in Danger TV - Mark Thomas TV - Hunger in America TV - Father Ted TV - Richard Wright - Robert Tressell - Lucy Worsley TV -
You can’t build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery. Norman Borlaug
How can we live in a society that uses hunger as a weapon? Ken Loach
If the unemployed are hungry, why don’t they eat their own bodies. All that good meat going to waste – it makes me mad. Spitting Image s1e6, Mrs Thatcher, ITV 1984
You hungry? The Book of Eli 2010 starring Denzel Washington & Gary Oldman & Mila Kunis & Ray Stevenson & Jennifer Beals & Evan Jones & Joe Pingue & Frances de la Tour & Michael Gambon & Tom Waits & Christ Browning et al, directors the Hughes brothers, Eli to mouse
You can’t hide the hunger and guilt; it’s a bright guilty world. The Lady from Shanghai 1948 starring Rita Hayworth & Orson Welles & Everett Sloane & Glenn Anders & Ted de Corsia & Erskine Sanford & Gus Schilling & Louis Merrill et al, director Orson Welles, Welles
As God is my witness, as God is my witness, they’re not going to beat me. I’m going to live through this and when it’s all over I’ll never be hungry again. Gone with the Wind 1939 starring Clark Gable & Vivien Leigh & Leslie Howard & Olivia de Haviland & Thomas Mitchell & Barbara Mitchell & Evelyn Keyes & Ann Rutherford & George Reeves & Fred Crane & Hattie McDaniel & Alicia Rhett et al, director Victor Fleming, Scarlett
Rule of Acquisition #214: Never begin a business negotiation on an empty stomach. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine s2e20: The Maquis I, Quark
I am so hungry I could even eat Quark’s food. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine s4e15: Sons of Mogh, Kira to O’Brien on runabout
We were told four years ago that seventeen million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet. Ronald Reagan, TV speech 27th October 1964
I want to keep fighting because it is the only thing that keeps me out of the hamburger joints. If I don’t fight, I’ll eat this planet. George Foreman
I was hungry for a cheeseburger in Africa. George Foreman
The United States has some of the best programs and laws in the world to protect its children but, as Unicef has pointed out the US also has one of the highest rates of the industrialized countries for poverty and hunger among children and also for child mortality. A recent story in the Washington Post noted that ‘despite this time of record prosperity, one in every six American children is poor; one in three children of colour. No other developed country has anything approaching US child poverty rates’. Mary Robinson, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 2001
And my more having would be as a sauce
To make me hunger more. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth IV iii 82-83, Malcolm
If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely; but they think we are too dear; the leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularise their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them. Let us revenge this with our pikes ere we become rakes; for the gods know, I speak this in hunger for bread not in thirst for revenge. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, First Citizen
Men have transformed the world with their knowledge. The short lean wheat has been made big and productive. Little sour apples have grown large and sweet, and that old grape that grew among the trees and fed the big birds has mothered a thousand varieties, red and black, green and pale pink, purple and yellow; and each variety with its own flavour.
The men who work in the experimental farms have made new fruits; nectarines and forty kinds of plums, walnuts with paper shells and always they work, selecting, grafting, changing, driving themselves, driving the earth to produce.
But men who graft the trees and make the seeds fertile and big can find no way to make the hungry eat their produce.
A million people hungry, needing the fruit – and kerosene spread over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back. They come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes flow by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze.
And in the eyes of the people there is a failure and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Hunger is always with us. From the dawn of time poverty has been the destiny of man. Horizon: Bread, BBC 1969
28-year-old Sven’s life is dominated by the drive to eat. He could literally eat himself to death. It’s not a question of willpower or choice no matter how much food he consumes he always feels hungry. For doctors Sven demonstrates that there is some sort of hardwire switch that turns hunger on or off. Horizon: Born to Be Fat, BBC 1999
Hunger really does make you sharper. Horizon: Eat, Fast and Live Longer, Michael Mosley, BBC 2012
Look Back in Hunger. Jo Brand, autobiography, 2009
We hunger in earnest for that which we cannot consume. Nenia Campbell, Black Beast
There is no humiliation more abusive than hunger. Pranab Mukherjee
The number of chronically hungry people will climb to over one billion worldwide. Barack Obama, July 2009
Fabulous wealth was spilling from roaring belching cities, but millions went hungry. Really hungry. Gaunt hungry. Shoeless children could be seen on the streets of every town. Andrew Marr’s Making of Modern Britain, BBC 2009
If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink. Proverbs 25:21
When thou hast enough, remember the time of hunger. Ecclesiasticus 18:25
Hunger makes a thief of any man. Pearl S Buck
You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you got out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow bricks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing … You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs. ibid
We went several days on dry bread, and then I was two and a half days with nothing to eat whatever. This was an ugly experience. There are people who do fasting cures of three weeks or more, and they say that fasting is quite pleasant after the fourth day. I do not know, never having gone beyond the third day. Probably it seems different when one is doing it voluntarily and is not underfed at the start. ibid.
Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though one had been turned into a jellyfish, or as though all one’s blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted. Complete inertia is my chief memory of hunger; that, and being obliged to spit very frequently, and the spittle being curiously white and flocculant, like cuckoo-spit. I do not know the reason for this, but everyone who has gone hungry several days has noticed it. ibid.
But two years of bread and margarine had lowered his standards hopelessly. He had lived on the filthy imitation of food till his own mind and body were compounded of inferior stuff. It was malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed his manhood. ibid.
It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you. ibid.