John Burnham Schwartz Quotes

If Victual should prove scarce, as we have not Goods or Money for any Value to send out for Corns [food grains like wheat]; so only a part of the People could be maintained: The better part would have Bread, but the more necessary part, the Laboring Men would be forced to leave the Country, or to starve in it.

You can't brace yourself for famine if you've never known hunger.

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.

Physical hunger and physical poverty is something I could only imagine. I've been poor when I was in China... As kids we never had to starve, but just didn't have enough meat, enough rice.

Food is available, but it cannot be shipped into an area, so the people in that area suffer the consequences.

Things were so bad we ate rabbits that neighbours had run over and gave to us because they knew we were broke.

The next summer, 1794, corn grew dear, and distress began in our land.

In Spain, there is a good deal to see but not much to eat.

No agitation for political reforms could be carried on by a plague-stricken and starving people. Food was what they needed and most urgently demanded. The political argument died away, drowned in cries and petitions for relief, lost in weepings and wailings for the victims who were perishing in hundreds by the roadsides, in the fields, and in their bare and empty houses.

We came from nothing really. One house. Ten people. Even days the lights was off. The worst days was not eating. Surviving off rice and toast.

Always have to think like a guy with no food in his refrigerator.

...when we really get into hard times, where food is scarce or there is none at all, and so with clothing and shelter, money may be no good for there may be nothing to buy, and you cannot eat money, you cannot get enough of it together to burn to keep you warm, and you cannot wear it.

The female population exceeds the male, you know, especially in New England, which accounts for the high state of culture we are in, perhaps.

When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.

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

A guy I interviewed for Hard Times says, "What do I remember about the Great Depression? That I was hungry, that's all." Elemental things.

I will venture to affirm, that the three seasons wherein our corn has miscarried did no more contribute to our present misery, than one spoonful of water thrown upon a rat already drowned would contribute to his death; and that the present plentiful harvest, although it should be followed by a dozen ensuing, would no more restore us, than it would the rat aforesaid to put him near the fire, which might indeed warm his fur-coat, but never bring him back to life.

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.

Parental anxieties: A timeline. Pre-1800s: Potato famine, death of entire villages. 1900s: Trying to keep dad's job through depression so entire family does not starve or have to sell off children to agribusiness. 2000: Infringement of Parenthood on sense of Personhood.

A poor man defended himself when charged with stealing food to appease the cravings of hunger, saying, the cries of the stomach silenced those of the conscience.

He looked at the piles of food again, and it was like he was seeing it with new eyes. This is wrong, he thought. Letting food rot while people die of hunger. It's evil.

We had a food store at the theatre and I used to pinch food. I pinched some trousers and shirts to keep me going but they would wear out. I was virtually on the breadline.

It is a hell of a thing to be hungry in your own house.

One cup of food a day changes Fabian's life completely. But this morning, about a billion people on Earth - or one out of every seven - woke up and didn't even know how to fill this cup. One out of every seven people.

Women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.