Starvation Quotes

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

“Desire is the kind of thing that
eats you
and
leaves you starving.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“Feel what it's like to truly starve, and I guarantee that you'll forever think twice before wasting food.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“It has to be admitted that starving nations never seem to be quite so starving that they cannot afford to have far more expensive armaments than anybody else.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Padre Crittle: … While resting on the side of the road I saw Amah Singh, one of the oldest Sikh inhabitants of Kamaing. He was walking very slowly with the aid of a bamboo. When he saw me he stopped and begged for something to eat. “Only half a biscuit, Sahib, only half a biscuit.” I am sure that he did not believe me when I told him I hadn’t got half a biscuit in the world …”
― Elizabeth Tebby Germaine, EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORIES OF SURVIVAL IN BURMA WW2: tens of thousands fled to India from the Japanese Invasion in 1942

“The third story is told in a long and detailed letter written to a friend by Sergeant Benjamin Katz, an orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps. … This letter is completely different from the other accounts, emotional, shocking, heartbreaking, funny and unforgettable.”
― Elizabeth Tebby Germaine, EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORIES OF SURVIVAL IN BURMA WW2: tens of thousands fled to India from the Japanese Invasion in 1942

“She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she’d thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be. (130)”
― Ron Rash, Serena

“That bowl of soup—it was dearer than freedom, dearer than life itself, past, present, and future.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

“One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture.”
― Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics

“The challenge of abating one with a genuine ego problem is to not try to put him down. Any and all antagonization, in his mind, is merely compensated for by his own descriptions: his feelings of persecution by the envious and his ideals of worth. Arguably, the genuine ego is more of a circumstantial defense mechanism rather than a steady arrogance in need of starvation.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...”
― Ramez Naam, Crux

“Some days it’s fine. Others it nearly breaks me. The emptiness of the horizon, and the hunger in my body, and how will we ever survive this if we can’t survive each other?”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“Tipsy, they tumbled early into bed - to get as much sleep as they could. So they would feel less hunger. The summer catch had been poor; there wasn't much food. They ate with care and looked sideways at the old: the old were gluttons, everybody knew it, and what was the good of feeding them? It wouldn't harm them to starve a little.
The hungry dogs howled. The women rinsed the children's bellies with hot water three times a day, so they wouldn't cry so much for food. The old starved silently. ("The North")”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories

“North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read the Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as 'duck.' One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy—they wouldn't tell me the breed—but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the realization that I hadn't seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“If I'm going to starve, I'll do it all at once—not by degrees.”
― L. Frank Baum, The Scarecrow of Oz

“Hunger should not make you eat whatever you are offered or given, it should help you see and understand what is unfit for your body.”
― Eduvie Donald

“Before Covid most people may have been aware that our politicians are not our friends, but Covid taught us that politicians are not only our enemies, but they are also actively trying to enslave us and kill us.”
― Jack Freestone

“Mothers as brave as lionesses, poor Belcourt children, little Kabyles starving to death in 1939 – those people also earned the applause.”
― Sima Samar, Outspoken: My Fight for Freedom and Human Rights in Afghanistan

“Death by nutritional deficiencies!”
― Steven Magee

“Greed will feed you full of starvation.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“When you’re starving, that’s all you think about.”
― Katherine Center, The Love Haters

“I'm existentially allergic to opulence,
every soft bed feels like a betrayal -
expensive meals scream of starving children,
dollar spent on luxury is a dollar animal.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“I'm existentially allergic to opulence, every soft bed feels like a betrayal - expensive meals scream of starving children.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Every soft bed feels like a betrayal, expensive meals scream of starving children.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“A homeless person on the street is commonly ignored by everyone; people just walk past them busily, as if that person doesn't even exist. This might not even be intentional, because they are so preoccupied with themselves that they don't notice the presence of that person. But the irony is that it is these same people who "forbid themselves from feeling sad" through social media posts due to "somewhere in the world, people are dying of hunger.”
― Sov8840

“No screaming of shells, no thunder of guns, only this close, hard pressure of human bodies, this desperate push of starving men.”
― Dot Allan, Makeshift & Hunger March: Two Novels

“In July 1941, the local head of the SD had proposed direct killing rather than slow starvation for the jews of Lodz: "There is the danger this winter that the Jews can no longer all be fed. It is to be seriously considered whether the most humane solution might not be to finish off those Jews not capable of working by some sort of fast-working preparation. This would be in any event more pleasant than letting them starve." in a mental world where starvation was taken to be the norm, other forms of killing could be presented as a kindness.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Considering the situation and circumstances,
the record for the next day, May 29,
is one which has a surprise in it
for those dull people who think that
nothing but medicines and doctors can cure the sick.

A little starvation, can really do more for the average sick man
than can the best medicines and the best doctors.

I do not mean a restricted diet;
I mean total abstention from food for one or two days.
I speak from experience;
starvation has been my cold and fever doctor for fifteen years,
and has accomplished a cure in all instances.”
― Mark Twain, My Debut as a Literary Person

“I took my own and Kolya’s two-day ration of bread and lard to the hospital,” the boy said, with unsettling calm beyond his years. “We must do everything we can to save him. If he dies, he won’t need food anymore.”
Danilo’s eyes filled with tears.
“Oh God, how could you let this happen?” he thought bitterly. “Is it fair to take a piece from one starving child to give it to another?”
He pulled his son’s head to his chest.
“You’re probably right,” he said quietly.
After a while, he returned from the pantry with an unusually full bucket of cornmeal and two bundles.
“Mother,” Danilo said to his mother-in-law, handing her the food, “besides the usual bread, bake a few pies with lard and pumpkin—for Kolya… and for Peter.”
— Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book Three


Context note:
Set during the Holodomor, this scene captures the impossible moral choices faced by families during the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine. A child’s stark logic forces adults to confront the inhuman calculus of survival—where compassion meant redistributing hunger, and saving one life could mean endangering another.”
― Володимир Шабля, Камінь. Біографічний роман. Книга третя. Несправджені сподівання.: Все буде Голодомор.