Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

When people are hungry, when a mother or father is facing a child that they can't feed, you can't ask that family to lay down their arms.

Hunger is the teacher of many.

Kelly, there are people in Somalia who would die for a banana.

No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

Bread did not have its usual nourishing power and strength because the grain was not nourished by the warmth of summer sunshine. Hence those who ate it, even in large quantities, were hungry again after a little while. There can be no doubt that the poor wasted away when even the rich were constantly hungry.... Four pennies worth of coarse bread was not enough to feed a common man for one day. The usual kinds of meat, suitable for eating, were too scarce; horse meat was precious; plump dogs were stolen. And, according to many reports, men and women in many places secretly ate their own children....

[Starving] women, children, the elderly, they don’t know anything about four-party talks. They want to eat. They want to live.

Hunger can bring out the worst in us.

Hot Potato is a very different game when the people playing are starving.

Hunger never saw bad bread.

... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.

Hunger allows no choice.

And who is any of us, that without starvation he can go through the kingdoms of starvation?

It has been well said that a hungry man is more interested in four sandwiches than four freedoms.

I know exactly what it's like to not have a penny. I know exactly what it's like trying to get a job. I know exactly what it's like having bloody one tin of Ambrosia left in the cupboard. But I know I can survive.

If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.

It's frightening to think about more sanctions. When I've met North Koreans in China, they've said to me, 'You have no idea how difficult our lives are. We live like dogs.' They wake up in the morning wondering what they're going to eat for dinner.

I left home because I was hungry.

As a child I was sometimes so hungry that I used to dream that one day I'd get locked in a grocery store.

A person who steals bread during a famine is not treated as a thief.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

I saw few die of hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand.

I wrote a story about a man who is orphaned during the 1927 Mississippi River flood in Louisiana, and he's on the banks of levee, and he's starving. And there are other people starving, too. And he's so desperate, he's seven years old, that he finds a pig that's been abandoned. He kills it with a hammer, and he drags it back.

I have stopped at farm after farm where lean, underfed women and sickly men repeated again and again the same story—little food and no opportunity to get more.

The hungry man does not hear.