Ben Katchor Quotes

I would eat fruitcake if there'd been a nuclear war and I'd run out of canned goods.

'Shank' is set in 2015, and it's set in a post-apocalyptic world where the main commodity is food. It's about how five young gentlemen travel around that harsh terrain and survive.

I've thought a lot about how if something horrible happened, and if it were like 'The Road' situation, I've decided I don't want to survive past the death of society as we know it.

They went into stores to get food to stay alive. Looting isn't the right word. I call it survival.

Hunger is the teacher of many.

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.

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

In the event of a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic dystopia, people with supplies of food and water could become warlords or chieftains in the social order that emerges out of the rubble.

...when we really get into hard times, where food is scarce or there is none at all, and so with clothing and shelter, money may be no good for there may be nothing to buy, and you cannot eat money, you cannot get enough of it together to burn to keep you warm, and you cannot wear it.

It is easy to think of potatoes, and fortunately for men who have not much money it is easy to think of them with a certain safety. Potatoes are one of the last things to disappear, in times of war, which is probably why they should not be forgotten in times of peace.

A person whose job is deep thinking about atomic war would no more call a 'megadeath' a 'million corpses' than an embalmer would refer to a 'loved one' as a 'stiff.'

Hunger never saw bad bread.

Quite often when you help poor people, they don't think about the environment. They think about survival.

One must expect a war between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. which will begin with the total destruction of London. I think the war will last 30 years, and leave a world without civilised people, from which everything will have to build afresh - a process taking (say) 500 years.

One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.

Hunger allows no choice.

Hunger can change everything you ever thought you knew about yourself.

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.

Farms and food production should be, I submit, at least as important as who pierced their navel in Hollywood this week. Please tell me I'm not the only one who believes this. Please. As a culture, we think we're well educated, but I'm not sure that what we've learned necessarily helps us survive.

The survivors (of a nuclear war) would envy the dead.

What freedom does a starving man have?" The answer is that starvation is a tragic human condition- perhaps more tragic than loss of freedom. That does not prevent these from being two different things.

The most important issues to address are the truly existential threats we face: climate change and nuclear war. On the former, the Republican leadership, in splendid isolation from the world, is almost unanimously dedicated to destroying the chances for decent survival; strong words, but no exaggeration. There is a great deal that can be done at the local and state level to counter their malign project.

I don't know what weapons will be used in the Third World War. But I can tell you what they'll use in the Fourth - rocks!

I know that homes burn and that you should think what to save before they start to. Not because, in the heat of it, everything looks as valuable as everything else. But, because nothing looks worth the bother, not even your life.

Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary.