Bernard Hopkins Quotes

We lived near a supermarket, and whatever they threw away, we would get it, and my mother would make soup. Or she would get a big can of lard, a big can of meal, a big can of flour, a big can of beans, and fix the same meal for months.

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

I was born in 1946, so I was born on the tail end of when everything was deemed important. You made things to last. If you came from a poor family, there was only one can opener.

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

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.

Hunger is the teacher of many.

Hunger never saw bad bread.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

For some reason I am one of those people who act like they were born and raised during the Depression.

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.

I think I probably have the philosophy of a poor man. You know, like maybe I'd steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes.

When people are poor, they find ways of making things taste like fish.

I grew up learning to do more with less.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

It's not hard to tell we was poor - when you saw the toilet paper dryin' on the clothesline.

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

To a man with an empty stomach food is God.

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.

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

I think being on a constraint with money makes you much more creative.

My mother made all of our clothes, my friends' mothers made all of their clothes. This was the Depression.

We were rather poor, but we always had what we needed.

We were an underprivileged family. My parents were both tailors. We got by. But we only had a few important things in our life.

We were poor and lived modestly, but we always had food on the table.

I was raised by my Depression-era grandma who taught me to use what you've got: Waste not, want not!