Marguerite Gardiner Quotes

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

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!

People did not even then like to eat dirt, if they could see it.

I believe I could commit a crime. We all can. It depends on which situations we find ourselves in. In despair, I would steal food if my children were hungry.

Some people were breaking in to get food for their families. They were in survivor mode. Don’t confuse that with a guy carting off a 64 inch television set and looting…. The test is take the mirror and put it in front of your face and ask what would you do.

A starving man thinks first of satisfying his hunger before anything else. He will sell his liberty and all for the sake of getting a morsel of food.

To a man with an empty stomach food is God.

Hunger is the teacher of many.

If the government will not do something to keep the Utes from starving, then they will have to steal.

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.

Sire, have pity on the Spanish infantry, which, for lack of pay and out of sheer starvation, is scouring the low country round, plundering the peasantry in mere need of food. These disorders I cannot repress, much less can I punish them, for necessity has no law.

There were two ways of looking at the world, but only one when you are starving.

Hunger finds no fault with the cookery.

The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern, yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, 'We are starving, how about a potato?' I speak from poignant memory.

Hunger gnawed at her empty stomach again and she said aloud: 'As God is my witness, and God is my witness, the Yankees aren't going to lick me. I'm going to live through this, and when it's over, I'm never going to be hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to steal or kill - as God is my witness, I'm never going to be hungry again.

It is useless to talk virtue to a starving girl.

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.

Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.

Starvation, not sin, is the parent of modern crime.

The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility

I used to walk to the Washington Monument from North L Street Northwest. And I was so hungry at times, I would stop and look into the trash cans, and if there was a half a sandwich, I would take that sandwich and eat it. It was just a matter of survival. I didn't think much of it, but it was just the way things were.

I definitely would say, by sixth grade, I was a professional shoplifter - and not because I wanted to. I'm not going out to shoplift earrings or clothes or shoes like the average teenager. I was shoplifting frozen dinners at a grocery store.

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.