96 Quotes About Hunger

In a world where food is abundant for some yet scarce for many, hunger remains one of the most poignant global issues we face today. It's a topic that touches upon not just the physical need for nourishment but also the deep-seated inequalities that persist across societies. Throughout history, thinkers, leaders, and everyday individuals have captured the essence of hunger in powerful and evocative words. Whether reflecting on its role in survival, its impact on human dignity, or its implications for justice and empathy, these quotes offer profound insights into the human condition. Join us as we explore a curated collection of the top 96 quotes about hunger, each reminding us of the urgent need to foster a world where no one goes to bed hungry.

1. “The man who is extremely and dangerously hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the satisfying of hunger are pushed into the background. 'But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of food and his belly in chronically filled? At once, other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than the psychological hungers, dominate the organism.” - Betty Friedan

2. “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

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

4. “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” - Mahatma Gandhi

5. “It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.” - George Eliot

6. “Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.” - Bertolt Brecht

7. “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

8. “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

9. “After a full belly all is poetry.” - Frank McCourt

10. “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

11. “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

12. “Or you can broil the meat, fry the onions, stew the garlic in the red wine...and ask me to supper. I'll not care, really, even if your nose is a little shiny, so long as you are self-possessed and sure that wolf or no wolf, your mind is your own and your heart is another's and therefore in the right place.” - M.F.K. Fisher

13. “If only the know-how could be equalled by the will-to-serve, by compassion for human suffering cause by hunger and deficiency diseases, there is no reason why fully balanced diets consisting largely of plant-foods should not be made available for hundreds of millions of undernourished people in the West as well as in the Third World.” - Robert Hart

14. “The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.” - Frances Moore Lappé

15. “I’ve supped on potatoes and groats and am waiting to be sick. How about you?I supped like the Lord in Heaven.’and what does the Lord in Heaven have for supper?’Nothing.” - Jan Neruda

16. “1 billion people in the world are chronically hungry. 1 billion people are overweight.” - Mark Bittman

17. “Like magic, she felt him getting nearer, felt it like a pull in the pit of her stomach. It felt like hunger but deeper, heavier. Like the best kind of expectation. Ice cream expectation. Chocolate expectation.” - Sarah Addison Allen

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

19. “We need houses as we need clothes, architecture stimulates fashion. It’s like hunger and thirst — you need them both.” - Karl Lagerfeld

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Some people prefer eating dessert to the main course. These people have never been really hungry.” - Vera Nazarian

23. “Smart stupid. Stupid smart.” - Michael Grant

24. “The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.” - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

25. “A starving child is a frightful sight. A starving vampire, even worse.” - Anne Rice

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

27. “We have not reached the consensus that to eat is a basic human right. This is an ethical crisis. This is a crisis of faith.” - Jean-Bertrand Aristide

28. “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

29. “Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger is not to have known it less.” - Jorie Graham

30. “Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.” - Barbara Kingsolver

31. “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

32. “It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.” - George Orwell

33. “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

34. “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

35. “You'll need to do a better job, Annabelle. No more dates like the first one tonight.""Agreed. And no more making me sit through your Power Matches introductions, either. As you so wisely pointed out, helping Portia Powers isn't in my best interests.""Then why are you still trying to talk me into seeing Melanie again?""Hunger makes me weird.""You got rid of the last one in fourteen minutes. Well done. I'm rewarding you by letting you sit in on all the introductions from now on."She nearly choked on an ice cube. "What are you talking about?""Exactly what I said.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

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

37. “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

38. “If God gives you a Quiznos, can I have a bite? No way. You have to pray for your own food.” - Michael Grant

39. “I don't know what it is with Finnick and bread, but he seems obsessed with handling it.” - Suzanne Collins

40. “When the average American says, “I’m starving,” it is a prelude to a midnight raid on a well-stocked refrigerator or a sudden trip to the nearest fast food restaurant.” - Carolyn Custis James

41. “Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other.” - Ann Voskamp

42. “I hunger for filling in a world that is starved.” - Ann Voskamp

43. “I want you to take a sleeve of Thin Mints and line them up on the edge of the kitchen counter and when I'm hungry I can just bend over and sweep a cookie into my mouth like I'm scoring a goal in hockey.” - Jack Gantos

44. “We ate our fill, but there was more left when we was done. 'It’ll be in the icebox if y’all want some more later on,' she told us. There weren’t no way I would have gone back and eat more. I knowed they was being extra nice to us right then, but if we didn’t act right, they would put us out. That’s how folks do.” - Eddie Whitlock

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

46. “Jeremy Bentham argued that 'even in the best of times the great mass of citizens will most probably possess few resources other than their daily labour and, consequently, be always near indigence'. As long as working man was near indigence, hunger would remain an effective tool to goad him to labour. Bentham argued that an important task of government was to ensure conditions of deprivation, thereby guaranteeing that hunger would [be a constant motivation to work].” - Linda McQuaig

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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

51. “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

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

53. “I search his eyes for the slightest sign of anything, fear, remorse, anger. But there's only the same look of amusement that ended our last conversation. It's as if he's speaking the words again. "Oh, my dear Miss Everdeen. I thought we had agreed not to lie to each other."He's right. We did.The point of my arrow shifts upward. I release the string. And President Coin collapses over the side of the balcony and plunges to the ground. Dead.” - Suzanne Collins

54. “I think about going to the lake, but I'm so weak that I barely make it to mymeeting place with Gale. I sit on the rock where Cressida filmed us, but it's too wide without his body beside me.Several times I close my eyes and count to ten, thinking that when I open them, he will have materialized without a sound as he so often did. I have to remind myself that Gale's in 2 with a fancy job, probably kissing another pairof lips.” - Suzanne Collins

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

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

57. “When we neglect our Bible study we often feel guilty. When you skip a meal do you feel guilty? No, you feel hungry. The Bible is food for our soul. When we fail to read it we should not feel guilty, we should feel hungry. Guilt is fueled by obligation hunger is fueled by desire.” - Tyler Edwards

58. “Living means constantly growing closer to death. Satisfaction only temporarily relieves hunger. Find the balance, and plant your feet.” - Jackie Morse Kessler

59. “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

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

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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “... a hunger that is more than simply material connects the human who feeds the chickens to the chickens that feed the humans.” - Susan Merrill Squier

65. “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

66. “Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.” - Dallas Willard

67. “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

68. “Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our lives. Our powers of rationalization are unlimited. They allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, starve and go to hell.” - Randy Alcorn

69. “I was not use to that kind of hunger, even as a poor college student.” - Julie Wenzel

70. “She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there - hidden under the more of less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child.You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn't argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you.” - Jean Rhys

71. “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

72. “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

73. “nice knowing ya...” - Fake Cinna

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

75. “Dare we care at all about current fashions if that means reducing our ability to help hungry neighbors? How many more luxuries should we buy for ourselves and our children when others are dying for lack of bread?” - Ron Sider

76. “The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite—on calories and portion size and what's going into the body versus what's being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel—keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women spend approximately $1 million every hour on cosmetics. This may or may not say something about female vanity, but it certainly says something about female energy, where it is and is not focused. Easier to worry about the body than the soul, easier to fit the self into the narrow slots of identity our culture offers to women than to create one...that allows for the expression of all passions, the satisfaction of all appetites. The great preoccupation with things like food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is less of a genuine focus on hunger—indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it—than it is a monumental distraction from hunger.” - Caroline Knapp

77. “Something is missing: that's as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be. ...There is something fundamentally insatiable about being human, as though we come into the world with a kind of built-in tension between the experience of being hungry, which is a condition of striving and yearning, and the experience of being fed, which may offer temporary satisfaction but always gives way to new strivings, new yearnings.” - Caroline Knapp

78. “What an ironic tragedy that an affluent, “Christian” minority in the world continues to hoard its wealth while hundreds of millions of people hover on the edge of starvation!” - Ronald J. Sider

79. “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

80. “I am hungry for power, but not to lord over others; only to own myself.” - Deborah Feldman

81. “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

82. “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

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

84. “Leadership Principle: As hunger increases, excuses decrease.” - Orrin Woodward

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “For the last several days I've had the sudden and general urge to buy a new book. I've stopped off at a few bookstores around the city, and while I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of books in that time, I have not found the one book that will satisfy my urge. It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that's afflicted me most of my life. I know enough about the course of the disease to know I'll discover something soon.” - Lewis Buzbee

89. “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

90. “She gave her husband such a night of sexual pleasure that his eyes followed her constantly after that, narrow and hot. He grew molten when she passed near other men, and at night they made their own shaking tent. They got teased too much and moved farther off, into the brush, into the nesting ground of shy and holy loons. There, no one could hear them. In solitude they made love until they became gaunt and hungry, pale windigos with aching eyes, tongues of flame.” - Louise Erdrich

91. “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

92. “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

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

94. “Half naked, he drank her in with his eyes, imprinting this moment into his mind. This, he would take to his death – the woman that stirred him to life.” - Dianna Hardy

95. “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

96. “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