Stefan Zweig Quotes

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

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

The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.

It is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.

… the unhappy Peasant cannot survive in his humble shelter; today pigswill is his only nourishment; what was once lavished on swine is now shared between man and beast. The People ask only for bread; they are even willing to pay for it with the sweat of their brows: at least let them eat it without watering it with tears.

Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.

Under miserable conditions of life, any vision of the possibility of better things makes the present misery more intolerable, and spurs those who suffer to the most energetic struggles to improve their lot, and if these struggles only immediately result in sharper misery, the outcome is sheer desperation.

I have come to believe that one thing people cannot bear is a sense of injustice. Poverty, cold, even hunger are more bearable than injustice.

The familiar mood that awaits the sensitive young who are poor and dispossessed is a mood of sharp and painful inferiority, of violently angry tensions, of desperate and overwhelming longings.

Injustice boils in men's hearts as does steel in its cauldron, ready to pour forth, white hot, in the fullness of time.

The poor North has much to do with slavery. It staggers under its load and smarts under its lash.

Sometimes, I can myself be frustrated by books that seem to me to be insufficiently realistic about the world's potential for just being totally a randomly bad place.

I had a very comfortable life, but there were people who spent their life in prison, whose families were destroyed.

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

Servility always curdles into rage in the end.

I don't hate nobody. I hate certain conditions that are inflicted upon the people - and they're helpless with it.

When you come from desperate poverty, and that's exactly what I come from, you know that nonsenses are not to be tolerated. I'm not sure who gains from chaos, but I know it's not the poor folks in the council flats. The politics of vindictiveness is never, ever anything like a solution.

Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.

When people said Africa would change me, I didn't understand what they meant. To see the poverty in the townships, for instance, is overwhelming. I found it heart-wrenching to see young children walking barefoot and hungry in the dirt. I'm the kind of person who wants to change the world right here and now, so I got frustrated.

Where is there beauty when you see deprivation and starvation?

We hate our squalor.

As long as there are people who are not happy with their lot in life, as long as the United States is perceived to somehow be the cause of this unhappiness, there will be terrorism.

I worry about Zimbabweans. They bend, they bend, they bend, they bend - where do the people break? How long can they go on scrounging for food in garbage dumps and using the moisture from sewage drains to plant vegetables?