Jaime Harrison Quotes

I lost my mom when I was seven, and at some point in my life having food it was like a big deal for me because it was not every day.

Working at the Food Bank with my kids is an eye-opener. The face of hunger isn't the bum on the street drinking Sterno; it's the working poor. They don't look any different, they don't behave any differently, they're not really any less educated. They are incredibly less privileged, and that's it.

I hate to see anybody sink. I hate to see anybody lose their dream, lose their home, something like that.

There are just way too many people suffering out there.

We came from nothing really. One house. Ten people. Even days the lights was off. The worst days was not eating. Surviving off rice and toast.

I lived in the streets for three years when I was a kid, and every day, I didn't know where my next meal would come from.

I lived on the street myself.

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.

Acceptable food rots while we are chased from bins behind restaurants, chased from sleeping on the street, chased from relieving ourselves unless we pay for food or gas, until finally we are so hungry, sleepless, smelly, constipated and beaten-down that we simply die of lack of will to live.

I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.

Every day, families in the United States face the stark choice between a roof over their heads and food on the table. Buying health insurance, owning a home, and saving up for college are just too far out of their reach.

I experienced firsthand what it means to be poor, what it means to go hungry, and that, I think, may be the reason, the root cause of why I'm able to work so hard, even these days.

There are people much less fortunate than us, and I don't mean people hungry sleeping in the streets either.

I used to sit in front of McDonald's and ask people for dollars to get me a cheeseburger. It was bad.

When people are hungry, when a mother or father is facing a child that they can't feed, you can't ask that family to lay down their arms.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, 'I'm an orphan again today, isn't this terrible? Poor me.'

A lot of people don't know what it's like to actually be hungry. I do. I've also slept on the streets.

There were days when my father didn't have money for food, and we slept hoping the next day something could be got from work.

Hunger and homelessness aren't things we always want to talk about.

Eventually I did that, but it took a lot of twists and turns, and there were a year or two there where I was living with no money at all - no home, no car, no nothing. I was living in somebody's garage in Los Angeles at that point - for a year.

I had spent many days hungry; had slept on railway stations at times because I did not have money to pay for a hotel room... there were moments when I felt I had compromised my dignity as a human being and as an actor.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, 'What are we going to do?' but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that's nothing.

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

Hunger is a deep concern of mine, and I feel that no one should go without food in this world as long as there are caring people to lend a hand. I've had to struggle in my past and I know what it's like to go without, so I try to do as much as I can to help bring awareness to an issue that hits very close to home for me.

I was brought up as an only child, and we were very close. But when I was 14, we got evicted. We came home to a padlock, and I looked up at my mom and she was crying, and there was nothing to do.