Albert Camus Quotes

It is useless to talk virtue to a starving girl.

The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love.

We cannot exist as a little island of well-being in a world where two-thirds of the people go to bed hungry every night.

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.

Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.

Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just.

We have no right to luxuries while the poor want bread.

I've known what it is to be hungry, but I always went right to a restaurant.

The pleasures of the mighty are obtained by the tears of the poor.

Jesus is a half-naked guy, hanging, nailed to a cross, and then people wear that around their neck, and then those are the people that are upset about violence in movies.

The motto was 'Pax', but the word was set in a circle of thorns.

God save us from people who do the morally right thing. It's always the rest of us who get broken in half.

In America, we like everyone to know about the good work we're doing anonymously.

We don't need flowery words about inequality to tell us that, and we don't need a party that has led while poverty and hunger rose to record levels to give us lectures about suffering.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

Hunger could not exist but through violation of economic laws and fundamental principles of social justice.

If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.

If you think the dominant orthodoxy - shrink your economy, render workers jobless, impoverish families, and still grow - is an oxymoron... then you would be right.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.

Beggars remind us that not all miseries arise from our ideas.

Why should there be hunger and deprivation in any land, in any city, at any table, when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life? There is no deficit in human resources. The deficit is in human will.

The state of inequality between individuals and between nations not only still exists; it is increasing. It still happens that side by side with those who are wealthy and living in plenty there exist those who are living in want, suffering misery and often actually dying of hunger; and their number reaches tens, even hundreds of millions.

I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men!