61 Quotes About Hunger

In a world overflowing with abundance, it's easy to overlook the stark reality of hunger that persists around the globe. Hunger, an issue that affects millions, is more than just the absence of food—it's a profound vulnerability that undermines health, dignity, and human potential. The following quotes are a poignant reminder of this reality, capturing the struggles and resilience of those who face hunger daily. Whether through the words of activists, authors, or everyday heroes, these quotes inspire a call to action and compassion. Join us as we delve into this curated collection, shedding light on the multifaceted nature of hunger and igniting a collective desire for change.

1. “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” - Dom Helder Camara

2. “An empty stomach is not a good political adviser.” - Albert Einstein

3. “But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” - Aldous Huxley

4. “In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life” - Paul Auster

5. “The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger.” - Fidel Castro

6. “Bread, soup - these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.” - Elie Wiesel

7. “Shukhov ate his supper without bread--a double portion and bread on top of it would be too rich. So he'd save the bread. You get no thanks from your belly--it always forgets what you've just done for it and comes begging again the next day.” - Alexandr Soljenitsin

8. “I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehow missed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000 excursions. Then, for no obvious reason, I decided to buy a footstool.” - Jeremy Clarkson

9. “1 billion people in the world are chronically hungry. 1 billion people are overweight.” - Mark Bittman

10. “They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food.” - Stephen King

11. “Two days' hunger made a fine sauce for anything.” - Robert Jordan

12. “We got so much food in America we're allergic to food. Allergic to food! Hungry people ain't allergic to shit. You think anyone in Rwanda's got a fucking lactose intolerance?!” - Chris Rock

13. “You live among this ridiculous wealth and you get lost. You worry about nonsense like spirituality and inner health and satisfaction and relationships.You have no idea what it is like to starve, to watch yourself turn to bones.” - Harlan Coben

14. “Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man.” - H.G. Wells

15. “Pa gen lape nan tet, si pa gen lape nan vant (there is no peace in the head if there is no peace in the stomach).” - Jean-Bertrand Aristide

16. “If all the Christians- I mean all of 'em- got outta the pews on Sundays and into the streets, we'd shut the city down.We'd shut down hunger.We'd shut down loneliness.We'd shut down the notion that there is any such of a thing as a person that don't deserve a kind word and a second chance.” - Ron Hall, Denver Moore

17. “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."....He breathed in the too-sweet smell of rotting food, "I can stop this evil.” - Margaret Peterson Haddix

18. “Men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them.... In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals.... What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals?” - John Steinbeck

19. “By defining the problem as "hunger," the emergency food system is helping to direct our attention away from the more fundamental problem of poverty, and the even more basic problem of inequality.” - Janet Poppendieck

20. “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

21. “Concentration comes out of a combination of confidence and hunger.” - Arnold Palmer

22. “Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

23. “My love, you are playing with a fire that you do not fully understand.” His voice was deep and controlled. “There are times I may not be able to control myself. I am injured, and I need to feed – this would be one of those times.” ~Cole” - Tina Carreiro

24. “In a heartbeat, a thousand voices took up the chant. King Joffrey and King Robb and King Stannis were forgotten, and King Bread ruled alone. "Bread." they clamored. "Bread, Bread!” - George R.R. Martin

25. “Hunger of choice is a painful luxury; hunger of necessity is terrifying torture.” - Mike Mullin

26. “Casey glanced at her plate again, recalling the posters of her elementary school lunchroom: YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT. So, how much you ate indicated the quantity of your desire. Walter was also implying that how quickly you got your food revealed the likelihood of achieving your goals. She was in fact terribly hungry, but she'd pretended to be otherwise to be ladylike and had moved away from the table to be agreeable, and now she'd continue to be hungry" (Free Food For Millionaires, p.92.)” - Min Jin Lee

27. “The Red Cross, our last hope, had left us to starve.” - Savo Heleta

28. “In famine, a focus on women and children highlights biology: here is a mother who cannot feed her child, a breakdown in the natural order of life. This focus obscures who and what is to blame for the famine, politically and economically, and can lead to the belief that a biological response, more food, will solve the problem.” - Sharman Apt Russell

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

30. “I want to reach out and grab his hand and hold it to me, right over my heart, right where it aches the most. I don't know if doing that would heal me or make my heart break entirely, but either way this constant hungry waiting would be over.” - Ally Condie

31. “As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension. It was just happening, like time, like geography. The web seemed so inherently endless that it didn't occur to me what wasn't there. My appetite for pictures and videos and news and music was so gigantic now that if something was shrinking, something immesurable, how would I notice?...Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine loosing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time.” - Miranda July

32. “No more fear of hunger. A new kind of freedom. But what then ... what? What would my life be like on a daily basis? Most of it has been consumed with the acquisition of food. Take that away and I'm not really sure who I am, what my identity is. The idea scares me some.” - Suzanne Collins

33. “By Rachel Corrie, aged 10 — 1990I’m here for other children.I’m here because I care.I’m here because children everywhere are suffering and because forty thousand people die each day from hunger.I’m here because those people are mostly children.We have got to understand that the poor are all around us and we are ignoring them.We have got to understand that these deaths are preventable.We have got to understand that people in third world countries think and care and smile and cry just like us.We have got to understand that they dream our dreams and we dream theirs.We have got to understand that they are us. We are them.My dream is to stop hunger by the year 2000.My dream is to give the poor a chance.My dream is to save the 40,000 people who die each day.My dream can and will come true if we all look into the future and see the light that shines there.If we ignore hunger, that light will go out.If we all help and work together, it will grow and burn free with the potential of tomorrow.” - Rachel Corrie

34. “He didn't like to be seen needing it - as if hunger were a sign of weakness.” - Lionel Shriver

35. “Previous experience had taught me that any expedition marches on its stomach.” - Tahir Shah

36. “Only.. I want to do die as myself” - Suzanne Collins

37. “A smile flitted across War's mouth, hidden by her helmet. She had little patience for religion (although she approved heartily of the religious fanatics who sought to cleanse the world of heresy), and the only faith War had was in cold steel and hot blood.” - Jackie Morse Kessler

38. “When you give yourself to me, completely, I will bite you. Until then, my love, I will only nibble on you.”~Cole” - Tina Carreiro

39. “Hunger is the best seasoning.” - Ken Follett

40. “And when we finally stood up and turned to face the world, I could feel something climbing through me. I could feel it on its hands and knees inside me, rising up, rising up - and I smiled.I smiled, thinking, The hunger, because I knew it all too well.The hunger.The desire.Then, slowly, as we walked on, I felt the beauty of it, and I could taste it, like words inside my mouth.” - Markus Zusak

41. “I've wandered through the real world, and written myself through the darkness of the streets inside me. I see people walking through the city and wonder where they've been, and what the moments of their lives have done to them. If they're anything like me, their moments have held them up and shot them down.Sometimes I just survive.But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.That's when the stories show up in me.They find me all the time.They're made of underdogs and fighters. They're made of hunger and desire and trying to live decent.The only trouble is, I don't know which of those stories comes first.Maybe they all just merge into one.We'll see, I guess.I'll let you know when I decide.” - Markus Zusak

42. “It might be depressing, but it's also the truth that no one has the power, the money, or the resources to save everyone on the planet from going hungry, living in poverty or allowed basic human rights. But consider the other side of this: there are people in this world who truly WOULD do all of these things for everyone if only they could. There is hope after all.” - Ashly Lorenzana

43. “I commit her to memory. When I'm alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he's ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there's nothing I can do to stop her.” - Mohsin Hamid

44. “I took to the Kingswood the midsummer after the Dame died. I did not swear a vow, but I kept to myself just as strictly, living like a beast in the forest from one midsummer to the next, without fire or iron or the taste of meat. I lived as prey, and I learned from the dogs how to run, from the hare how to hide in the bracken, and from the deer how to go hungry.In sorrow and pride I exiled myself to Kingswood. I shunned fire for I feared the kingsmen would hunt me down, and so by the way of cold and hunger I came near to refusing life itself. I never thought to anger or please a god by it.” - Sarah Micklem

45. “No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. Ever since I stopped having to go hungry, I literally eat life itself. And when I eat, I am locked up inside the taste of eating. For sixty years, ever since I came back from the camp, I have been eating against starvation.” - Herta Müller

46. “We clean our plates, yet we’re still famished—starving for something other than food.” - Kate Wicker

47. “Perhaps a past of bingeing, restricting, or purging comes back to haunt you from time to time. Maybe you have to fight hard battles against vanity, gluttony, and shame. But with God’s saving power, every new day is a gift, an opportunity to detach yourself from tormenting thoughts about food or how you look and to attach yourself to God. Remember, we all hunger for God, more than we hunger for a big bowl of ice cream or a perfect physique.” - Kate Wicker

48. “So why is a third of our world battling obesity and spending huge sums to burn off excess calories, while the other two-thirds yearn to get more of them?” - Wess Stafford

49. “It is a sinful abomination for one part of the world's Christians to grow richer year by year while our brothers and sisters ache and suffer for lack of minimal health care, minimal education, and even—in some cases—enough food to escape starvation.” - Ronald J. Sider

50. “The intelligent poor individual was a much finer observer than the intelligent rich one. The poor individual looks around him at every step, listens suspiciously to every word he hears from the people he meets; thus, every step he takes presents a problem, a task, for his thoughts and feelings. He is alert and sensitive, he is experienced, his soul has been burned...” - Knut Hamsun

51. “If women are breadwinners and men bring home the bacon, why do people complain about having no dough? I'm confused. Also hungry.” - Stephen Colbert

52. “You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.” - Dr. Norman Ernest Borlaug

53. “God is not glorified when we keep for ourselves (no matter how thankfully) what we ought to be using to alleviate the misery of unevangelized, uneducated, unmedicated, and unfed millions. The evidence that many professing Christians have been deceived by this doctrine is how little they give and how much they own. God has prospered them. And by an almost irresistible law of consumer culture (baptized by a doctrine of health, wealth, and prosperity) they have bought bigger (and more) houses, newer (and more) cars, fancier (and more) clothes, better (and more) meat, and all manner of trinkets and gadgets and containers and devices and equipment to make life more fun. They will object: Does not the Old Testament promise that God will prosper his people? Indeed! God increases our yield, so that by giving we can prove our yield is not our god. God does not prosper a man's business so that he can move from a Ford to a Cadillac. God prospers a business so that 17,000 unreached people can be reached with the gospel. He prospers the business so that 12 percent of the world's population can move a step back from the precipice of starvation.” - John Piper

54. “The bread which you hold back belongs to the hungry; the coat, which you guard in your locked storage-chests, belongs to the naked; the footwear mouldering in your closet belongs to those without shoes. The silver that you keep hidden in a safe place belongs to the one in need. Thus, however many are those whom you could have provided for, so many are those whom you wrong.” - Saint Basil

55. “Hungry for beautiful words, the fox comes rooting around in the hedge, almost too close to the fire. He reads my mind with one glance and is gone. All my poetry is now trotting around the bushes inside him, maybe some day to be partly eaten or left to rot. He understands being alive for as long as he can be, and does not worry about why, or what might happen afterwards.” - jay woodman

56. “We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.That is the unconsolable heartburn, the lifelong disquietude of having been made in the image of God.” - Robert Farrar Capon

57. “21Most food goes to waste in affluent societies. When we throw leftovers into the garbage, it goes to waste. When we eat more food than we need, it goes to waist.” - Earle Gray

58. “Most of the seven billion people in this world suffer from malnutrition. Half do not have enough to eat and the rest of us eat too much.” - Earle Gray

59. “There's always the dwarf bread.” - Terry Pratchett

60. “He could have watched her all night. He could watch her for an eternity and still never be able to capture the essence of what it is that makes ‘love’.” - Dianna Hardy

61. “She waited for him with shallow breaths, head thrown back, eyes half closed, completely exposed in her trust of him, and it unravelled the last thread holding him together.” - Dianna Hardy